Workshop Objectives and Motivation

This full-day workshop at ICRA 2014 brings together researchers working in different fields of robotics, computer vision and machine learning to discuss novel concepts and ideas for robust vision-based place recognition in severely changing environments.

 

Such changes – induced e.g. by the time of day, weather or seasonal effects as well as human activity – are a ubiquitous challenge for all autonomous systems aiming at long-term operations in both indoor and outdoor settings.

 

The workshop features a tutorial that introduces the basic principles and the state of the art to participants without previous experiences in the field. Three invited talks and a number of contributed talks discuss the newest developments, concepts and ideas in the areas covered by the workshop topics. These topics comprise novel techniques for scene matching (both whole-image as well as feature-based), modelling and predicting systematic or repeating appearance changes, as well as learning non-changing or invariant features or exploiting semantic or prior knowledge. A further interest of the workshop are questions of collecting long-term datasets in changing indoor and outdoor environments to enable standardized benchmarks.

 

We see this workshop as a complement to the very successful workshops on long-term autonomy of past ICRA conferences. We concentrate on a specialized but highly relevant research topic that is among the key requirements for truly useful long-term operation of robotic systems in the real world.

 

Important Dates

1. • March 24th        Submission deadline

2. • April 4th             Notification of acceptance

3. • April 14th           Final paper deadline

4. • June 1st             Workshop will be held at ICRA 2014 in Hong Kong

 

News

1. • May 21th:     The final program is online.