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