HOI-LCD: Leveraging Humans as Dynamic Landmarks Toward Thermal Loop Closing Even in Complete Darkness

Tatsuro Sakai, Yanshuo Bai, Kanji Tanaka, Wuhao Xie, Jonathan Tay Yu Liang, Daiki Iwata

2025

Abstract

Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is a foundational technology for autonomous navigation, enabling simultaneous localization and mapping in diverse indoor and outdoor environments. Among its components, loop closure plays a vital role in maintaining global map consistency by recognizing revisited locations and correcting accumulated localization errors. Conventional SLAM methods have primarily relied on RGB cameras, leveraging feature-based matching and graph optimization to achieve high-precision loop detection. Despite their success, these methods are inherently sensitive to illumination conditions and often fail under low-light or high-contrast scenes. Recently, thermal infrared cameras have gained attention as a robust alternative, particularly in dark or visually degraded environments. While various thermal-inertial SLAM approaches have been proposed, they still depend heavily on static structures and visual features, limiting their effectiveness in textureless or dynamic environments. To address this limitation, we propose a novel loop closure method that utilizes Human-Object Interaction (HOI) as dynamic-static composite landmarks in thermal imagery. Although humans are conventionally considered unsuitable as landmarks due to their motion, our approach overcomes this by introducing HOI feature points as landmarks. These feature points exhibit both a human attribute, characterized by stable detection across RGB and thermal domains via person tracking, and a static-object attribute, characterized by contact with visually consistent, semantically meaningful objects. This duality enables robust loop closure even in dynamic, low-texture, and dark environments, where traditional methods typically fail.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Sakai T., Bai Y., Tanaka K., Xie W., Liang J. and Iwata D. (2025). HOI-LCD: Leveraging Humans as Dynamic Landmarks Toward Thermal Loop Closing Even in Complete Darkness. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO; ISBN 978-989-758-770-2, SciTePress, pages 105-115. DOI: 10.5220/0013775900003982

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco25,
author={Tatsuro Sakai and Yanshuo Bai and Kanji Tanaka and Wuhao Xie and Jonathan Liang and Daiki Iwata},
title={HOI-LCD: Leveraging Humans as Dynamic Landmarks Toward Thermal Loop Closing Even in Complete Darkness},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO},
year={2025},
pages={105-115},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013775900003982},
isbn={978-989-758-770-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO
TI - HOI-LCD: Leveraging Humans as Dynamic Landmarks Toward Thermal Loop Closing Even in Complete Darkness
SN - 978-989-758-770-2
AU - Sakai T.
AU - Bai Y.
AU - Tanaka K.
AU - Xie W.
AU - Liang J.
AU - Iwata D.
PY - 2025
SP - 105
EP - 115
DO - 10.5220/0013775900003982
PB - SciTePress