Image-Goal Navigation Using Refined Feature Guidance and Scene Graph Enhancement

In this paper, we introduce a novel image-goal navigation approach, named RFSG. Our focus lies in leveraging the fine-grained connections between goals, observations, and the environment within limited image data, all the while keeping the navigation architecture simple and lightweight. To this end, we propose the spatial-channel attention mechanism, enabling the network to learn the importance of multi-dimensional features to fuse the goal and observation features. In addition, a selfdistillation mechanism is incorporated to further enhance the feature representation capabilities. Given that the navigation task needs surrounding environmental information for more efficient navigation, we propose an image scene graph to establish feature associations at both the image and object levels, effectively encoding the surrounding scene information. Crossscene performance validation was conducted on the Gibson and HM3D datasets, and the proposed method achieved stateof-the-art results among mainstream methods, with a speed of up to 53.5 frames per second on an RTX3080. This contributes to the realization of end-to-end image-goal navigation in realworld scenarios. The implementation and model of our method have been released at: https://github.com/nubot-nudt/RFSG.