Visual Loop Closure Detection Through Deep Graph Consensus

Visual loop closure detection traditionally relies on place recognition methods to retrieve candidate loops that are validated using computationally expensive RANSAC-based geometric verification. As false positive loop closures significantly degrade downstream pose graph estimates, verifying a large number of candidates in online simultaneous localization and mapping scenarios is constrained by limited time and compute resources. While most deep loop closure detection approaches only operate on pairs of keyframes, we relax this constraint by considering neighborhoods of multiple keyframes when detecting loops. In this work, we introduce LoopGNN, a graph neural network architecture that estimates loop closure consensus by leveraging cliques of visually similar keyframes retrieved through place recognition. By propagating deep feature encodings among nodes of the clique, our method yields high-precision estimates while maintaining high recall. Extensive experimental evaluations on the TartanDrive 2.0 and NCLT datasets demonstrate that LoopGNN outperforms traditional baselines. Additionally, an ablation study across various keypoint extractors demonstrates that our method is robust, regardless of the type of deep feature encodings used, and exhibits higher computational efficiency compared to classical geometric verification baselines. We release our code, supplementary material, and keyframe data at https://loopgnn.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Digital Epidemiology: Leveraging Social Media for Insight into Epilepsy and Mental Health

Social media platforms, particularly Reddit's r/Epilepsy community, offer a unique perspective into the experiences of individuals with epilepsy (PWE) and their caregivers. This study analyzes 57k posts and 533k comments to explore key themes across demographics such as age, gender, and relationships. Our findings highlight significant discussions on epilepsy-related challenges, including depression (with 39.75\% of posts indicating severe symptoms), driving restrictions, workplace concerns, and pregnancy-related issues in women with epilepsy. We introduce a novel engagement metric, F(P), which incorporates post length, sentiment scores, and readability to quantify community interaction. This analysis underscores the importance of integrated care addressing both neurological and mental health challenges faced by PWE. The insights from this study inform strategies for targeted support and awareness interventions.