Global localization using a monocular camera is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision and intelligent robotics. In this article, a new deep neural network named Mixture Density (MD)-PoseNet is proposed to address this problem. Unlike existing learning-based global localization methods that return a single guess for the camera pose, MD-PoseNet returns multiple guesses represented in the form of a Gaussian mixture (GM). The key idea of MD-PoseNet is that the network returns the distribution of all probable camera poses instead of the most probable camera pose, and the distribution represents the multiple guesses for the camera pose. The multiple guesses returned by MD-PoseNet are, consequently, exploited in the probabilistic framework of particle filters. Finally, the proposed method is applied to four different environments, and its validity is demonstrated via experiments.

In this paper, a novel normal distribution mixture matching based model free object tracking algorithm using 2D LIDAR is proposed. Each target object is modeled as a normal distribution mixture that captures the distribution of the points scanned from the surface of the object. This novel representation enables normal distribution transform (NDT) to accurately estimate the motion of objects, even if the shape of the points differs depending on where it is observed. Our evaluation of the proposed algorithm shows good performance in practical applications. In addition, we provides an alternative way of segmentation and data association using occupancy grid map to avoid a problem that defines a distance metric between the mixture and the point cloud. As a result, the proposed algorithm works in real time in our experiments.