Evaluation of color and texture descriptors for matching of planar surfaces in global localization scheme

•Indoor global localization system based on planar segments with visual descriptors.•Applicability of 6 color and 3 texture descriptors is systematically analyzed.•Performance increase in initial correspondence and pose hypothesis evaluation phases.•Evaluation benchmark for visual descriptors in global localization is proposed.

This paper presents a systematic study about the applicability of color/texture descriptors in a global localization system based on planar surface segments. Two comprehensive experiments regarding matching of planar surface segments and robot pose hypothesis evaluation were conducted. The experiments show that using color/texture descriptors to prune potential surface pairs in the initial correspondence phase and to provide additional information in the hypothesis evaluation phase of a feature-based localization scheme can result in considerable speedup of the localization process and help distinguish between geometrically similar places. An experimental benchmark which enables researchers to evaluate the performance of color and texture descriptors in the context of mobile robot localization based on planar surface segments is presented.