解决无人机长期飞行中视觉定位的遗忘问题,提升动态环境下的持续识别能力。
Towards Lifelong Aerial Autonomy: Geometric Memory Management for Continual Visual Place Recognition in Dynamic Environments
- 分层记忆框架:用卫星图锚点保全局几何,用动态缓冲区存特定场景特征。
- 多样性选择使知识保留率比随机策略高7.8%,显著缓解遗忘。
- 适合长期飞行任务的无人机系统,尤其在无结构环境中表现更优。
在动态环境中的鲁棒地理定位对长期空中自主至关重要。尽管视觉场景识别(VPR)模型在视图与训练域匹配时表现良好,但在连续任务中分布变化会引发灾难性遗忘。现有持续学习方法常因地理特征存在严重类内差异而失效。本文将空中VPR建模为基于任务的域增量学习(DIL)问题,提出一种新型异构记忆框架。为满足机载存储限制,采用“学与弃”流水线,将地理知识分解为静态卫星锚点(保留全局几何先验)和动态经验回放缓冲区(保留域特异性特征)。引入空间约束分配策略,依据样本难度或特征空间多样性优化缓冲区选择。为系统评估,构建了基于21个多样化任务序列的基准与三项评价标准。大量实验表明,该架构显著提升空间泛化能力;多样性驱动的缓冲区选择相比随机基线知识保留率提高7.8%。相较于依赖类别均值保持的方法在非结构化环境中失效,最大化结构多样性实现了更好的可塑性-稳定性平衡,并确保在随机化序列中具备顺序无关的鲁棒性。结果证明,在长期空中自主中,维持结构特征覆盖比关注样本难度更为关键。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Robust geo-localization in changing environmental conditions is critical for long-term aerial autonomy. While visual place recognition (VPR) models perform well when airborne views match the training domain, adapting them to shifting distributions during sequential missions triggers catastrophic forgetting. Existing continual learning (CL) methods often fail here because geographic features exhibit severe intra-class variations. In this work, we formulate aerial VPR as a mission-based domain-incremental learning (DIL) problem and propose a novel heterogeneous memory framework. To respect strict onboard storage constraints, our "Learn-and-Dispose" pipeline decouples geographic knowledge into static satellite anchors (preserving global geometric priors) and a dynamic experience replay buffer (retaining domain-specific features). We introduce a spatially-constrained allocation strategy that optimizes buffer selection based on sample difficulty or feature space diversity. To facilitate systematic assessment, we provide three evaluation criteria and a comprehensive benchmark derived from 21 diverse mission sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our architecture significantly boosts spatial generalization; our diversity-driven buffer selection outperforms the random baseline by 7.8% in knowledge retention. Unlike class-mean preservation methods that fail in unstructured environments, maximizing structural diversity achieves a superior plasticity-stability balance and ensures order-agnostic robustness across randomized sequences. These results prove that maintaining structural feature coverage is more critical than sample difficulty for resolving catastrophic forgetting in lifelong aerial autonomy.
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