ViPRICE-Space

The research project "ViPRICE-Space: Visual Place recognition in changing environments" on visual localization in challenging space-analog environments achieved funding by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space. The goal of this project is to bridge the research gap in Visual Place Recognition by transferring state-of-the-art VPR performance from terrestrial to extraterrestrial environments. These environments present unique challenges, including highly repetitive structures, sparse visual and semantic features, severe perceptual aliasing, and extreme illumination conditions. The potential of, and challenges associated with, such navigation systems have recently been highlighted by the initial success and subsequent crash of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity illustrated in the above image. The project aims to develop robust place recognition methods capable of reliable operation under these demanding conditions while potentially exploiting different visual sensor modalities.