VPR 2015 - 2015 Workshop on Visual Place Recognition in Changing Environments

This half-day workshop at ICRA 2015 builds on the highly successful 2014 workshop of the same name by bringing together researchers working in different fields of robotics, computer vision, machine learning and visual neuroscience to discuss novel concepts and ideas for robust vision-based place recognition in severely changing environments.
Such changes ? induced 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, and are highly relevant to visual neuroscience. The workshop features a tutorial that introduces the basic principles and the state of the art to participants without previous experience in the field. Two confirmed invited talks by Paul Newman and David Cox 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. The workshop will also address questions of collecting long-term datasets in changing indoor and outdoor environments to enable standardized benchmarks. Finally, we will run an inaugural place recognition challenge in association with the workshop, with prizes to be awarded at the conclusion of the workshop.