iBoW-LCD is a library that can be used to detect loop closures in a sequence of images. Instead of using the typical Bag-of-Words (BoW) scheme, iBoW-LCD makes use of an incremental Bags of Binary Words algorithm called OBIndex2, allowing the use of binary descriptors to accelerate the image description process and avoiding the problems that classical BoW approaches present.

iBoW-LCD is released as a ROS package, and relies on OpenCV 3.x and Boost libraries as well as OBIndex2 package. It can be used with any binary descriptor computed using the OpenCV format.

Note that iBoW-LCD is research code. The authors are not responsible for any errors it may contain. Use it at your own risk!

iBoW-LCD is distributed under the terms of the GPL3 License.

The details of the algorithm are explained in the following publication:

iBoW-LCD: An Appearance-based Loop Closure Detection Approach using Incremental Bags of Binary Words
Emilio Garcia-Fidalgo and Alberto Ortiz
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol. 3, No. 4, Pgs. 3051-3057 (Oct. 2018)

A preprint can be found here. If you use this code, please cite:

@article{Garcia-Fidalgo2018, 
  author={Emilio Garcia-Fidalgo and Alberto Ortiz}, 
  journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters}, 
  title={iBoW-LCD: An Appearance-Based Loop-Closure Detection Approach Using Incremental Bags of Binary Words}, 
  year={2018}, 
  volume={3}, 
  number={4}, 
  pages={3051-3057}, 
  doi={10.1109/LRA.2018.2849609}, 
  month={Oct}
}

1. First of all, you have to install OBIndex2 and its dependencies as a ROS package.

2. Clone the repository into your workspace:

cd ~/your_workspace/src
git clone http://github.com/emiliofidalgo/ibow-lcd.git

3. Compile the package using, as usual, the catkin_make command:

cd ..
catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

4. Finally, you can run an example with:

rosrun ibow-lcd demo /directory/of/images

To see an example of how to use the loop closure detector, see the demo file src/main.cc.

If you have problems or questions using this code, please contact the author ([email protected]). Feature requests and contributions are totally welcome.