Lightweight Ground Texture Localization (L-GROUT)

L-GROUT is a lightweight global-localization system that matches natural ground texture observed by a downward-facing camera to a prebuilt map. It improves localization performance while reducing computation enough to run in real time on resource-constrained, single-board computers without GPU acceleration.

Key Contributions

• An improved method for selecting database features
• Locality-preserving dimensionality reduction that supports fast binary features
• A spatial-voting stage designed to retain accuracy in lightweight configurations

Performance Highlight

• Runs the complete localization pipeline at more than 4 Hz on a Raspberry Pi 4

L-GROUT provides millimeter-scale global localization without markers, installed infrastructure, or other environmental modifications.