Fast Global Localization on Neural Radiance Field (ICRA 2025)

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🔥 Overview

Fast-Loc-NeRF is a novel approach for fast and accurate global localization in NeRF maps. While Loc-NeRF introduced the idea of Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) using NeRF, it suffers from slow rendering speed, making it impractical for real-time applications.

Fast-Loc-NeRF improves upon this by introducing:
✔ Particle Rejection Weighting: Uses NeRF's inherent uncertainty estimation to filter out unreliable particles.
✔ Coarse-to-Fine Matching: Matches rendered pixels with observed images progressively from low to high resolution, reducing computational overhead.

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🏞️ Overview Diagram

*Figure: Overview of Fast-Loc-NeRF.*

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📊 Experimental Results

Fast-Loc-NeRF outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and efficiency.

Figure: Localization accuracy and speed comparison.

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📽️ Video Demonstration

(Click the image to watch the video on YouTube)

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Using LLFF Data for Global Localization

Download LLFF images and pretrained NeRF-Pytorch weights from NeRF-Pytorch.

Place data using the following structure:

├── configs   
│   ├── ...
├── ckpts                                                                                                       
│   │   ├── fern
|   |   |   └── fern.tar                                                                                                                     
│   │   ├── fortress
|   |   |   └── fortress.tar                                                                                   
│   │   ├── horns
|   |   |   └── horns.tar   
│   │   ├── room
|   |   |   └── room.tar   
│   │   └── ...                                                                                 
                                                                                            
├── data                                                                                                                                                                                                       
│   ├── nerf_llff_data                                                                                                  
│   │   └── fern  # downloaded llff dataset                                                                                                                         
│   │   └── fortress  # downloaded llff dataset                                                                                  
│   │   └── horns   # downloaded llff dataset
|   |   └── room   # downloaded llff dataset
|   |   └── ...

After updating your yaml file fast.yaml with the directory where you placed the data and any other params you want to change, you are ready to run Fast-Loc-NeRF! By default, Fast-Loc-NeRF will estimate the camera pose of 5 random images from each of fern, fortress, horns, room (20 images in total). You can use rviz to provide real-time visualization of the ground truth pose and the particles.

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1. Installation

System Requirements

• ROS Environment: Install ROS following the official ROS installation guide.
• Docker Support: The system is designed to run in containerized environments using Docker for consistent deployment.

Setup Fast-Loc-NeRF

Option 1: Docker Setup (Recommended)

Fast-Loc-NeRF can be easily deployed using Docker containers, which provides a consistent environment across different systems:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/kmk97/Fast-Loc-NeRF.git
cd Fast-Loc-NeRF

# Build and run Docker container (detailed Docker setup will be provided)
# Docker configuration handles all dependencies and ROS environment setup automatically

Option 2: Local Installation

# Create workspace for Fast-Loc-NeRF
mkdir -p ~/fast_locnerf_ws/src
cd ~/fast_locnerf_ws/
catkin init

# Clone Fast-Loc-NeRF repository
cd ~/fast_locnerf_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/kmk97/Fast-Loc-NeRF.git

# Build the workspace
catkin build

# Activate the workspace
source ~/fast_locnerf_ws/devel/setup.bash

# Install required Python packages for Fast-Loc-NeRF
cd ~/fast_locnerf_ws/src/Fast-Loc-NeRF
pip install torch torchvision torchaudio
pip install opencv-python numpy scipy matplotlib pyyaml tqdm imageio configargparse

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2. Running Fast-Loc-NeRF

Docker Execution (Recommended)

For Docker users, Fast-Loc-NeRF can be launched directly within the containerized environment:

# Run Fast-Loc-NeRF in Docker container
# (Detailed Docker run commands will be provided)

Local Execution

For local installation, launch Fast-Loc-NeRF using ROS:

roslaunch locnerf navigate.launch parameter_file:=<config_file.yaml>

Note: Both Docker and local execution support RViz visualization for monitoring global localization progress and particle distributions.

3. Configuration Files

Fast-Loc-NeRF provides two configuration profiles in the /cfg directory for different experimental scenarios. These configurations work seamlessly in both Docker and local environments:

• fast.yaml: Our enhanced configuration featuring particle rejection weighting and coarse-to-fine matching algorithms. This profile showcases Fast-Loc-NeRF's accelerated convergence and improved accuracy in challenging global localization tasks.

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Publications

If you find this code relevant for your work, please consider citing our paper:

@article{kong2024fast,
  title={Fast global localization on neural radiance field},
  author={Kong, Mangyu and Lee, Seongwon and Lee, Jaewon and Kim, Euntai},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.12202},
  year={2024}
}

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Acknowledgments

This work is built upon Loc-NeRF and NeRF-Pytorch.

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.