  Vector-quantization can be a computationally expensive step in visual
bag-of-words (BoW) search when the vocabulary is large. A BoW-based appearance
SLAM needs to tackle this problem for an efficient real-time operation. We
propose an effective method to speed up the vector-quantization process in
BoW-based visual SLAM. We employ a graph-based nearest neighbor search (GNNS)
algorithm to this aim, and experimentally show that it can outperform the
state-of-the-art. The graph-based search structure used in GNNS can efficiently
be integrated into the BoW model and the SLAM framework. The graph-based index,
which is a k-NN graph, is built over the vocabulary words and can be extracted
from the BoW's vocabulary construction procedure, by adding one iteration to
the k-means clustering, which adds small extra cost. Moreover, exploiting the
fact that images acquired for appearance-based SLAM are sequential, GNNS search
can be initiated judiciously which helps increase the speedup of the
quantization process considerably.
