arXiv AI

Lost in the Tail: Addressing Geographic Imbalance in Urban Visual Place Recognition

arXiv:2607. 00090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban-scale Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to identify the geographic location of a query image by matching it against a geo-tagged database.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

GeoStore: Finding Small Storefronts in Large Scenes -- A Fine-Grained POI Localization Benchmark with Global-to-Local Asymmetric Matching

GeoStore is a new benchmark for fine‑grained point‑of‑interest (POI) localization that matches close‑up storefront photos against large geo‑tagged street‑view images, a task distinct from traditional visual place recognition. The paper shows that global‑descriptor methods designed for symmetric matching perform poorly on this asymmetric problem, and introduces GLAM, a Global‑to‑Local Asymmetric Matching approach that combines a global retrieval anchor with a lightweight local re‑ranking using pooled region tokens. GLAM achieves higher Recall@1/5/10 and mAP than strong baselines while using far fewer re‑ranking features and significantly lower per‑pair matching cost.

By Lu Han, Xiting Sun, Hao Wang, Zhiqiang Cao, Ruihuan Du, Ziquan Zeng, Chunlong Lv
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

MMS-VPR: A Fine-Grained Multimodal Street-Level Visual Place Recognition Dataset and Evaluation Benchmark for Dense Pedestrian Environments

arXiv:2505.12254v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing visual place recognition (VPR) datasets predominantly rely on vehicle-mounted imagery, offer limited multimodal diversity, and under...

By Yiwei Ou, Xiaobin Ren, Ronggui Sun, Guansong Gao, Kaiqi Zhao, Manfredo Manfredini
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

EventGeM: Global-to-Local Feature Matching for Event-Based Visual Place Recognition

EventGeM introduces a global‑to‑local feature fusion pipeline for event‑based visual place recognition, combining whole‑image feature detection with 2D homography‑based re‑ranking via RANSAC. It adds a regional generalized mean (GeM) pooling layer that learns to extract the most relevant spatial features from event streams, producing a compact global descriptor trained on the NYC‑Event‑VPR dataset. The method demonstrates significant improvements in viewpoint‑robust localization, achieving 7–43 percentage point gains in Recall@1 over the strongest baseline and real‑time performance on a robotic platform.

By Adam D. Hines, Gokul B. Nair, Nicol\'as Marticorena, Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

GTPred: Benchmarking MLLMs for Interpretable Geo-localization and Time-of-capture Prediction

GTPred is a new benchmark for geo‑temporal prediction that evaluates multi‑modal large language models (MLLMs) on 370 images taken across 120 years worldwide. It assesses predictions by matching both the year and a hierarchical location sequence, and includes annotated reasoning chains to test intermediate reasoning. Experiments on 15 MLLMs show that while visual perception is strong, models still lack world knowledge and geo‑temporal reasoning, and that adding temporal data improves location inference.

By Jinnao Li, Tingzhu Chen, Changbo Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization

OpenCVL is a large, open dataset for fine-grained cross-view localization, comprising 617,388 ground‑aerial image pairs from 41 European cities. It blends high‑end sensor data with diverse in‑the‑wild images and includes a curation framework to correct pose annotations, enabling reliable evaluation. The dataset also offers cross‑area and snowy test sets to probe generalization, and experiments show that adding noisy in‑the‑wild data improves model performance on clean tests.

By Zimin Xia, Mubariz Zaffar, Junsheng Fu, Alexandre Alahi, Julian F. P. Kooij
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

RIM: A Retrieval-In-Matching Framework for Cross-Domain Global Visual Localization of UAVs

Global visual localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using remote-sensing reference maps has attracted increasing attention. However, acquisition-time and imaging-platform differences between UAV and reference imagery induce substantial cross-domain appearance and viewpoint shifts, challenging robust six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation.