Cited by 17Advanced Image and Video Retrieval TechniquesImage Retrieval and Classification TechniquesAdvanced Neural Network Applications

Focus on Local: Finding Reliable Discriminative Regions for Visual Place Recognition

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Wang, Changwei, Chen, Shunpeng, Song, Yukun, Xu, Rongtao, Zhang, Zherui, Zhang, Jiguang, Yang, Haoran, Zhang, Yu +6 more·2025·Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is aimed at predicting the location of a query image by referencing a database of geotagged images. For VPR task, often fewer discriminative local regions in an image produce important effects while mundane background regions do not contribute or even cause perceptual aliasing because of easy overlap. However, existing methods lack precisely modeling and full exploitation of these discriminative regions. In addition, the lack of pixel-level correspondence supervision in the VPR dataset hinders further improvement of the local feature matching capability in the re-ranking stage. In this paper, we propose the Focus on Local (FoL) approach to stimulate the performance of image retrieval and re-ranking in VPR simultaneously by mining and exploiting reliable discriminative local regions in images and introducing pseudo-correlation supervision. First, we design two losses, Extraction-Aggregation Spatial Alignment Loss (SAL) and Foreground-Background Contrast Enhancement Loss (CEL), to explicitly model reliable discriminative local regions and use them to guide the generation of global representations and efficient re-ranking. Second, we introduce a weakly-supervised local feature training strategy based on pseudo-correspondences obtained from aggregating global features to alleviate the lack of local correspondences ground truth for the VPR task. Third, we suggest an efficient re-ranking pipeline that is efficiently and precisely based on discriminative region guidance. Finally, experimental results show that our FoL achieves the state-of-the-art on multiple VPR benchmarks in both image retrieval and re-ranking stages and also significantly outperforms existing two-stage VPR methods in terms of computational efficiency.

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  • V-LOAM integrated visual odometry with LiDAR-based mapping, leveraging complementary geometric and texture features.

    “Early multimodal fusion approaches, such as V-LOAM [143], integrated visual odometry with LiDAR-based mapping, effectively leveraging the complementary nature of geometric and texture-based features.”

    From Multimodal fusion and vision–language models: A survey for robot vision (2026) · cites this paper as [143]

    The Related Works and Two-Stage VPR sections discuss image-based visual place recognition, not V-LOAM. Searches for V-LOAM, LiDAR-based mapping, and visual odometry found no passage in our copy addressing the attributed integration or its geometric and texture features. The returned passages have no page numbers. (LLM, conf=0.76)

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Research works printed but not linked: 14

  1. Ali-bey, A.; Chaib-draa, B.; and Giguère, P. 2023. MixVPR: Feature Mixing for Visual Place Recognition. In WACV, 2998-3007.
  2. Berton, G.; Masone, C.; and Caputo, B. 2022a. Rethinking visual geo-localization for large-scale applications. In Pro- ceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 4878-4888.
  3. Berton, G.; Masone, C.; and Caputo, B. 2022b. Rethink- ing visual geo-localization for large-scale applications. In CVPR, 4878-4888.
  4. Berton, G.; Trivigno, G.; Caputo, B.; and Masone, C. 2023. EigenPlaces: Training Viewpoint Robust Models for Visual Place Recognition. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Inter- national Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 11080- 11090.
  5. Cuturi, M. 2013. Sinkhorn distances: Lightspeed computa- tion of optimal transport. Advances in neural information processing systems, 26.
  6. Izquierdo, S.; and Civera, J. 2024. Optimal Transport Aggre- gation for Visual Place Recognition. In Accepted to CVPR.
  7. Keetha, N.; Mishra, A.; Karhade, J.; Jatavallabhula, K. M.; Scherer, S.; Krishna, M.; and Garg, S. 2023. Anyloc: To- wards universal visual place recognition. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
  8. Lu, F.; Dong, S.; Zhang, L.; Liu, B.; Lan, X.; Jiang, D.; and Yuan, C. 2024a. Deep Homography Estimation for Visual Place Recognition. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 38, 10341-10349.
  9. Lu, F.; Lan, X.; Zhang, L.; Jiang, D.; Wang, Y.; and Yuan, C. 2024b. CricaVPR: Cross-image Correlation-aware Rep- resentation Learning for Visual Place Recognition. In Ac- cepted to CVPR.
  10. Lu, F.; Zhang, L.; Lan, X.; Dong, S.; Wang, Y.; and Yuan, C. 2024d. Towards Seamless Adaptation of Pre-trained Models for Visual Place Recognition. In ICLR.
  11. Sünderhauf, N.; Neubert, P.; and Protzel, P. 2013. Are we there yet? Challenging SeqSLAM on a 3000 km journey across all four seasons. In Workshop on Long-Term Auton- omy, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Au- tomation (ICRA).
  12. Van Erven, T.; and Harremos, P. 2014. Rényi divergence and Kullback-Leibler divergence. IEEE Transactions on Infor- mation Theory, 60(7): 3797-3820.
  13. Wang, C.; Xu, R.; Lu, K.; Xu, S.; Meng, W.; Zhang, Y.; Fan, B.; and Zhang, X. 2023. Attention weighted local descrip- tors. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(9): 10632-10649.
  14. Zhu, S.; Yang, L.; Chen, C.; Shah, M.; Shen, X.; and Wang, H. 2023. R 2 Former: Unified retrieval and reranking trans- former for place recognition. In CVPR, 19370-19380.

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Authors
Wang, C., Chen, S., Song, Y., Xu, R., Zhang, Z., Zhang, J., Yang, H., Zhang, Y., Fu, K., Du, S., Xu, Z., Gao, L., Guo, L., & Xu, S.
Affiliations
  • Qilu University of Technology (CN)
  • Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (CN)
  • Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
  • Tongji University (CN)
  • Fuzhou University (CN)
  • Shandong University (CN)
Venue
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Published
2025-04-11
Volume
39
Issue
7
Pages
7536-7544
ISSN
  • 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
  • 2374-3468
OpenAlex
W4409366443
Cited by
17
References
25
Citations by year
2026: 13 · 2025: 4
FWCI
12.69
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Figshare (submittedVersion)
  • AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62162044, 32271983, 62171321, 62271074)
  • Beihang University (VRLAB2023B01)
  • Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (2023HWYQ)
  • State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems (VRLAB2023B01)
  • National Science and Technology Major Project (2022ZD0116800)
  • Young Scientists Fund
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
Keywords
visual place recognition, re-ranking, perceptual aliasing, two-stage retrieval

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