Visual Data Driven Approach for Metric Localization in Substation

To localize inspection robot in an in-service substation costs much. How to discriminate its location among highly similar scenes is the main problem of localizing robot in the substation using vision. A novel approach for visual localization using image retrieval and multi-view geometry is proposed. It is applicable for autonomous inspection of in-service substation without additional modifications of the environment. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of our approach. They have been further discussed by means of parameters for image description, number of neighbouring images for coordinates estimation, training dataset selection and performance evaluation. They verified that our approach is a cost-effective solution to robot localization in in-service substation.