FlexLoc: Conditional Neural Networks for Zero-Shot Sensor Perspective Invariance in Object Localization with Distributed Multimodal Sensors

TL;DR

FlexLoc introduces a conditional neural network approach that adapts to unseen sensor perspectives in object localization, significantly improving accuracy in zero-shot scenarios without requiring additional calibration data.

Contribution

The paper presents FlexLoc, a novel neural network method that dynamically adjusts to new sensor perspectives during deployment, enhancing zero-shot localization accuracy.

Findings

Almost 50% improvement in localization accuracy in zero-shot scenarios.

Effective generalization to unseen sensor perspectives with minimal overhead.

Outperforms baseline models on multimodal indoor tracking dataset.

Abstract

Localization is a critical technology for various applications ranging from navigation and surveillance to assisted living. Localization systems typically fuse information from sensors viewing the scene from different perspectives to estimate the target location while also employing multiple modalities for enhanced robustness and accuracy. Recently, such systems have employed end-to-end deep neural models trained on large datasets due to their superior performance and ability to handle data from diverse sensor modalities. However, such neural models are often trained on data collected from a particular set of sensor poses (i.e., locations and orientations). During real-world deployments, slight deviations from these sensor poses can result in extreme inaccuracies. To address this challenge, we introduce FlexLoc, which employs conditional neural networks to inject node perspective information to adapt the localization pipeline. Specifically, a small subset of model weights are derived from node poses at run time, enabling accurate generalization to unseen perspectives with minimal additional overhead. Our evaluations on a multimodal, multiview indoor tracking dataset showcase that FlexLoc improves the localization accuracy by almost 50% in the zero-shot case (no calibration data available) compared to the baselines. The source code of FlexLoc is available at https://github.com/nesl/FlexLoc.