arXiv Computer Vision

HuMemSLAM: Efficient Human-Inspired Semantic Place Recognition for Robust Visual SLAM

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
Oct 16

RoboAtlas: Contextual Active SLAM

RoboAtlas is a contextual Active SLAM framework that balances geometric exploration with semantic reasoning through a scalable 3D semantic mapping system called OpenRoboVox. It uses frontier exploration, global semantic‑map reasoning, and egocentric VLM‑based reasoning guided by a contextual multi‑armed bandit to shift from exploration to semantically guided navigation as scene understanding improves. In simulation and on a Unitree Go2 robot, RoboAtlas achieved a 100% task success rate in environments over 1800 m² with ~30k semantic instances, and outperformed prior baselines on the GOAT‑Bench "Val Unseen" benchmark, reaching 90.6% SR with GPT‑4o and 88.8% SR with Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B.

By Alexander Schperberg, Shivam K. Panda, Abraham P. Vinod, Bhagawan Rokaha, M. K. Jawed, Stefano Di Cairano
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Multi-viewpoint Geo-localization with Event Cameras

The paper presents MegaEvent, an event‑based visual place recognition system that remains robust to viewpoint changes. By converting five large‑scale geo‑tagged datasets into synthetic event streams and fine‑tuning a vision transformer with a multi‑loss function, MegaEvent achieves an average Recall@1 of 82% on three event‑based localization datasets, outperforming existing methods by 20 recall points. The authors also introduce the Springfield‑Event‑VPR dataset, a 3.7 km walking route recorded in three camera orientations, where MegaEvent surpasses the strongest baseline by 9 recall points.

By Adam D. Hines, Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

DXPR: Depth-Based Vision-LiDAR Cross-Modal Place Recognition Using Vision Foundation Models

DXPR is a depth‑based cross‑modal place recognition framework that matches monocular camera queries to a LiDAR map using a single vision foundation model backbone. By converting both modalities into a unified depth image representation, DXPR learns modality‑invariant global descriptors without modality‑specific encoders. A geometry‑aware overlap miner refines pairwise metric learning by computing pixel‑level overlap scores, and extensive tests on KITTI and Boreas show strong performance across seasons, weather, and day/night conditions, outperforming prior CMPR baselines.

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
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.