Robust Image Retrieval-based Visual Localization using Kapture
NAVER LABS Europe（NAVER LABS 欧洲研究院）
Martin Humenberger, Yohann Cabon, Nicolas Guerin, Julien Morat, Vincent Leroy, Jérôme Revaud, Philippe Rerole, Noé Pion, Cesar de Souza, Gabriela Csurka
Visual localization tackles the challenge of estimating the camera pose from images by using correspondence analysis between query images and a map. This task is computation and data intensive which poses challenges on thorough evaluation of methods on various datasets. However, in order to further advance in the field, we claim that robust visual localization algorithms should be evaluated on multiple datasets covering a broad domain variety. To facilitate this, we introduce kapture, a new, flexible, unified data format and toolbox for visual localization and structure-from-motion (SFM). It enables easy usage of different datasets as well as efficient and reusable data processing. To demonstrate this, we present a versatile pipeline for visual localization that facilitates the use of different local and global features, 3D data (e.g. depth maps), non-vision sensor data (e.g. IMU, GPS, WiFi), and various processing algorithms. Using multiple configurations of the pipeline, we show the great versatility of kapture in our experiments. Furthermore, we evaluate our methods on eight public datasets where they rank top on all and first on many of them. To foster future research, we release code, models, and all datasets used in this paper in the kapture format open source under a permissive BSD license. github.com/naver/kapture, github.com/naver/kapture-localization
NAVER LABS Europe；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）
Visual localization, i.e., camera pose estimation in a known scene, is a core component of technologies such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. State-of-the-art localization approaches often rely on image retrieval techniques for one of two tasks: (1) provide an approximate pose estimate or (2) determine which parts of the scene are potentially visible in a given query image. It is common practice to use state-of-the-art image retrieval algorithms for these tasks. These algorithms are often trained for the goal of retrieving the same landmark under a large range of viewpoint changes.…
NAVER LABS Europe（NAVER LABS欧洲）；NAVER LABS（NAVER实验室）；Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学捷克信息学、机器人与控制论研究所）
Visual localization, i.e., camera pose estimation in a known scene, is a core component of technologies such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. State-of-the-art localization approaches often rely on image retrieval techniques for one of two purposes: (1) provide an approximate pose estimate or (2) determine which parts of the scene are potentially visible in a given query image. It is common practice to use state-of-the-art image retrieval algorithms for both of them. These algorithms are often trained for the goal of retrieving the same landmark under a large range of viewpoint chan…
Outdoor visual localization is a crucial component to many computer vision systems. We propose an approach to localization from images that is designed to explicitly handle the strong variations in appearance happening between daytime and nighttime. As revealed by recent long-term localization benchmarks, both traditional feature-based and retrieval-based approaches still struggle to handle such changes. Our novel localization method combines a state-of-the-art image retrieval architecture with condition-specific sub-networks allowing the computation of global image descriptors that are explic…
We introduce a novel deep neural network architecture that links visual regions to corresponding textual segments including phrases and words. To accomplish this task, our architecture makes use of the rich semantic information available in a joint embedding space of multi-modal data. From this joint embedding space, we extract the associative localization maps that develop naturally, without explicitly providing supervision during training for the localization task. The joint space is learned using a bidirectional ranking objective that is optimized using a $N$-Pair loss formulation. This tra…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Google（谷歌）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
Determining the precise geographic location of an image at a global scale remains an unsolved challenge. Standard image retrieval techniques are inefficient due to the sheer volume of images (>100M) and fail when coverage is insufficient. Scalable solutions, however, involve a trade-off: global classification typically yields coarse results (10+ kilometers), while cross-view retrieval between ground and aerial imagery suffers from a domain gap and has been primarily studied on smaller regions. This paper introduces a hybrid approach that achieves fine-grained geo-localization across a large ge…
Fine-grained image hashing is a challenging problem due to the difficulties of discriminative region localization and hash code generation. Most existing deep hashing approaches solve the two tasks independently. While these two tasks are correlated and can reinforce each other. In this paper, we propose a deep fine-grained hashing to simultaneously localize the discriminative regions and generate the efficient binary codes. The proposed approach consists of a region localization module and a hash coding module. The region localization module aims to provide informative regions to the hash cod…
This paper addresses the problem of vehicle-mounted camera localization by matching a ground-level image with an overhead-view satellite map. Existing methods often treat this problem as cross-view image retrieval, and use learned deep features to match the ground-level query image to a partition (eg, a small patch) of the satellite map. By these methods, the localization accuracy is limited by the partitioning density of the satellite map (often in the order of tens meters). Departing from the conventional wisdom of image retrieval, this paper presents a novel solution that can achieve highly…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Microsoft（微软）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Visual localization is a key step in many robotics pipelines, allowing the robot to (approximately) determine its position and orientation in the world. An efficient and scalable approach to visual localization is to use image retrieval techniques. These approaches identify the image most similar to a query photo in a database of geo-tagged images and approximate the query's pose via the pose of the retrieved database image. However, image retrieval across drastically different illumination conditions, e.g. day and night, is still a problem with unsatisfactory results, even in this age of powe…
IMT Atlantique（大西洋国立高等矿业电信学院）；Lab-STICC（STICC实验室）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Mila（米拉研究所）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Vision based localization is the problem of inferring the pose of the camera given a single image. One solution to this problem is to learn a deep neural network to infer the pose of a query image after learning on a dataset of images with known poses. Another more commonly used approach rely on image retrieval where the query image is compared against the database of images and its pose is inferred with the help of the retrieved images. The latter approach assumes that images taken from the same places consists of the same landmarks and, thus would have similar feature representations. These …
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
The large variation of viewpoint and irrelevant content around the target always hinder accurate image retrieval and its subsequent tasks. In this paper, we investigate an extremely challenging task: given a ground-view image of a landmark, we aim to achieve cross-view geo-localization by searching out its corresponding satellite-view images. Specifically, the challenge comes from the gap between ground-view and satellite-view, which includes not only large viewpoint changes (some parts of the landmark may be invisible from front view to top view) but also highly irrelevant background (the tar…
Technical University Delft（代尔夫特理工大学）；TomTom（TomTom公司）
This work addresses visual cross-view metric localization for outdoor robotics. Given a ground-level color image and a satellite patch that contains the local surroundings, the task is to identify the location of the ground camera within the satellite patch. Related work addressed this task for range-sensors (LiDAR, Radar), but for vision, only as a secondary regression step after an initial cross-view image retrieval step. Since the local satellite patch could also be retrieved through any rough localization prior (e.g. from GPS/GNSS, temporal filtering), we drop the image retrieval objective…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
Geo-localization is a critical task in computer vision. In this work, we cast the geo-localization as a 2D image retrieval task. Current state-of-the-art methods for 2D geo-localization are not robust to locate a scene with drastic scale variations because they only exploit features from one semantic level for image representations. To address this limitation, we introduce a hierarchical attention fusion network using multi-scale features for geo-localization. We extract the hierarchical feature maps from a convolutional neural network (CNN) and organically fuse the extracted features for imag…
Vision-based localization of an agent in a map is an important problem in robotics and computer vision. In that context, localization by learning matchable image features is gaining popularity due to recent advances in machine learning. Features that uniquely describe the visual contents of images have a wide range of applications, including image retrieval and understanding. In this work, we propose a method that learns image features targeted for image-retrieval-based localization. Retrieval-based localization has several benefits, such as easy maintenance and quick computation. However, the…
Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems（哈尔克维奇信息传输问题研究所）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）；Moscow Gamma-Knife Center（莫斯科伽马刀中心）；Burdenko Neurosurgery Institute（布尔坚科神经外科研究所）
Classification-based image retrieval systems are built by training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on a relevant classification problem and using the distance in the resulting feature space as a similarity metric. However, in practical applications, it is often desirable to have representations which take into account several aspects of the data (e.g., brain tumor type and its localization). In our work, we extend the classification-based approach with multitask learning: we train a CNN on brain MRI scans with heterogeneous labels and implement a corresponding tumor image retrieval system…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
We present the design of an entire on-device system for large-scale urban localization using images. The proposed design integrates compact image retrieval and 2D-3D correspondence search to estimate the location in extensive city regions. Our design is GPS agnostic and does not require network connection. In order to overcome the resource constraints of mobile devices, we propose a system design that leverages the scalability advantage of image retrieval and accuracy of 3D model-based localization. Furthermore, we propose a new hashing-based cascade search for fast computation of 2D-3D corres…
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局信息通信研究院）；ESP xMedia Pte. Ltd.（ESP xMedia 私人有限公司）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
The focus of this paper is on the problem of image retrieval with attribute manipulation. Our proposed work is able to manipulate the desired attributes of the query image while maintaining its other attributes. For example, the collar attribute of the query image can be changed from round to v-neck to retrieve similar images from a large dataset. A key challenge in e-commerce is that images have multiple attributes where users would like to manipulate and it is important to estimate discriminative feature representations for each of these attributes. The proposed FashionSearchNet-v2 architect…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
In this work, we introduce a Denser Feature Network (DenserNet) for visual localization. Our work provides three principal contributions. First, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture which aggregates feature maps at different semantic levels for image representations. Using denser feature maps, our method can produce more keypoint features and increase image retrieval accuracy. Second, our model is trained end-to-end without pixel-level annotation other than positive and negative GPS-tagged image pairs. We use a weakly supervised triplet ranking loss to learn discriminat…
Vision based solutions for the localization of vehicles have become popular recently. We employ an image retrieval based visual localization approach. The database images are kept with GPS coordinates and the location of the retrieved database image serves as an approximate position of the query image. We show that localization can be performed via descriptors solely extracted from semantically segmented images. It is reliable especially when the environment is subjected to severe illumination and seasonal changes. Our experiments reveal that the localization performance of a semantic descript…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（空天地海一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；MinSheng FinTech Corp. Ltd（民生金融科技股份有限公司）
Fashion products typically feature in compositions of a variety of styles at different clothing parts. In order to distinguish images of different fashion products, we need to extract both appearance (i.e., "how to describe") and localization (i.e.,"where to look") information, and their interactions. To this end, we propose a biologically inspired framework for image-based fashion product retrieval, which mimics the hypothesized twostream visual processing system of human brain. The proposed attentional heterogeneous bilinear network (AHBN) consists of two branches: a deep CNN branch to extra…
Target before Shooting: Accurate Anomaly Detection and Localization under One Millisecond via Cascade Patch Retrieval
Jiangxi Normal University（江西师范大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition（模式识别国家重点实验室）
Visual localization to compute 6DoF camera pose from a given image has wide applications such as in robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc. Two kinds of descriptors are important for the visual localization. One is global descriptors that extract the whole feature from each image. The other is local descriptors that extract the local feature from each image patch usually enclosing a key point. More and more methods of the visual localization have two stages: at first to perform image retrieval by global descriptors and then from the retrieval feedback to make 2D-3D point corresponde…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
The task of large-scale retrieval-based image localization is to estimate the geographical location of a query image by recognizing its nearest reference images from a city-scale dataset. However, the general public benchmarks only provide noisy GPS labels associated with the training images, which act as weak supervisions for learning image-to-image similarities. Such label noise prevents deep neural networks from learning discriminative features for accurate localization. To tackle this challenge, we propose to self-supervise image-to-region similarities in order to fully explore the potenti…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Huawei（华为）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Data61/CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61所）
We address the problem of ground-to-satellite image geo-localization, that is, estimating the camera latitude, longitude and orientation (azimuth angle) by matching a query image captured at the ground level against a large-scale database with geotagged satellite images. Our prior arts treat the above task as pure image retrieval by selecting the most similar satellite reference image matching the ground-level query image. However, such an approach often produces coarse location estimates because the geotag of the retrieved satellite image only corresponds to the image center while the ground …
School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学计算机科学与电子工程学院）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）
Visual navigation localizes a query place image against a reference database of place images, also known as a `visual map'. Localization accuracy requirements for specific areas of the visual map, `scene classes', vary according to the context of the environment and task. State-of-the-art visual mapping is unable to reflect these requirements by explicitly targetting scene classes for inclusion in the map. Four different scene classes, including pedestrian crossings and stations, are identified in each of the Nordland and St. Lucia datasets. Instead of re-training separate scene classifiers wh…
An efficient method is proposed for refining GPS-acquired location coordinates in urban areas using camera images, Google Street View (GSV) and sensor parameters. The main goal is to compensate for GPS location imprecision in dense area of cities due to proximity to walls and buildings. Avail-able methods for better localization often use visual information by using query images acquired with camera-equipped mobile devices and applying image retrieval techniques to find the closest match in a GPS-referenced image data set. The search areas required for reliable search are about 1-2 sq. Km and …
We propose a novel concept of asymmetric feature maps (AFM), which allows to evaluate multiple kernels between a query and database entries without increasing the memory requirements. To demonstrate the advantages of the AFM method, we derive a short vector image representation that, due to asymmetric feature maps, supports efficient scale and translation invariant sketch-based image retrieval. Unlike most of the short-code based retrieval systems, the proposed method provides the query localization in the retrieved image. The efficiency of the search is boosted by approximating a 2D translati…
Accurate information about the location and orientation of a camera in mobile devices is central to the utilization of location-based services (LBS). Most of such mobile devices rely on GPS data but this data is subject to inaccuracy due to imperfections in the quality of the signal provided by satellites. This shortcoming has spurred the research into improving the accuracy of localization. Since mobile devices have camera, a major thrust of this research has been seeks to acquire the local scene and apply image retrieval techniques by querying a GPS-tagged image database to find the best mat…
Image Retrieval with Intra-Sweep Representation Learning for Neck Ultrasound Scanning Guidance
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Intuitive Surgical Inc.（直觉外科公司）；School of Biomedical Engineering, The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学生物医学工程学院）
BGG: Bridging the Geometric Gap between Cross-View images by Vision Foundation Model Adaptation for Geo-Localization
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education of China, Xidian University（中国教育部智能感知与图像理解重点实验室，西安电子科技大学）；School of Telecommunications, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学电信学院）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
The task of cross-view image geo-localization aims to determine the geo-location (GPS coordinates) of a query ground-view image by matching it with the GPS-tagged aerial (satellite) images in a reference dataset. Due to the dramatic changes of viewpoint, matching the cross-view images is challenging. In this paper, we propose the GeoCapsNet based on the capsule network for ground-to-aerial image geo-localization. The network first extracts features from both ground-view and aerial images via standard convolution layers and the capsule layers further encode the features to model the spatial fea…
Building on progress in feature representations for image retrieval, image-based localization has seen a surge of research interest. Image-based localization has the advantage of being inexpensive and efficient, often avoiding the use of 3D metric maps altogether. That said, the need to maintain a large number of reference images as an effective support of localization in a scene, nonetheless calls for them to be organized in a map structure of some kind. The problem of localization often arises as part of a navigation process. We are, therefore, interested in summarizing the reference images …
Most existing image retrieval systems use text queries as a way for the user to express what they are looking for. However, fine-grained image retrieval often requires the ability to also express where in the image the content they are looking for is. The text modality can only cumbersomely express such localization preferences, whereas pointing is a more natural fit. In this paper, we propose an image retrieval setup with a new form of multimodal queries, where the user simultaneously uses both spoken natural language (the what) and mouse traces over an empty canvas (the where) to express the…
We propose a technique to improve the search efficiency of the bag-of-words (BoW) method for image retrieval. We introduce a notion of difficulty for the image matching problems and propose methods that reduce the amount of computations required for the feature vector-quantization task in BoW by exploiting the fact that easier queries need less computational resources. Measuring the difficulty of a query and stopping the search accordingly is formulated as a stopping problem. We introduce stopping rules that terminate the image search depending on the difficulty of each query, thereby signific…
Visual localization techniques often comprise a hierarchical localization pipeline, with a visual place recognition module used as a coarse localizer to initialize a pose refinement stage. While improving the pose refinement step has been the focus of much recent research, most work on the coarse localization stage has focused on improvements like increased invariance to appearance change, without improving what can be loose error tolerances. In this letter, we propose two methods which adapt image retrieval techniques used for visual place recognition to the Bayesian state estimation formulat…
Accurate vehicle localization is a crucial step towards building effective Vehicle-to-Vehicle networks and automotive applications. Yet standard grade GPS data, such as that provided by mobile phones, is often noisy and exhibits significant localization errors in many urban areas. Approaches for accurate localization from imagery often rely on structure-based techniques, and thus are limited in scale and are expensive to compute. In this paper, we present a scalable visual localization approach geared for real-time performance. We propose a hybrid coarse-to-fine approach that leverages visual …
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室（MERL））；University of Utah（犹他大学）
In this paper, we propose VLASE, a framework to use semantic edge features from images to achieve on-road localization. Semantic edge features denote edge contours that separate pairs of distinct objects such as building-sky, road- sidewalk, and building-ground. While prior work has shown promising results by utilizing the boundary between prominent classes such as sky and building using skylines, we generalize this approach to consider semantic edge features that arise from 19 different classes. Our localization algorithm is simple, yet very powerful. We extract semantic edge features using a…
The Graduate Center and City College, CUNY（纽约市立大学研究生中心与城市学院）
Indoor localization has many applications, such as commercial Location Based Services (LBS), robotic navigation, and assistive navigation for the blind. This paper formulates the indoor localization problem into a multimedia retrieving problem by modeling visual landmarks with a panoramic image feature, and calculating a user's location via GPU- accelerated parallel retrieving algorithm. To solve the scene similarity problem, we apply a multi-images based retrieval strategy and a 2D aggregation method to estimate the final retrieval location. Experiments on a campus building real data demonstr…
Image features for retrieval-based localization must be invariant to dynamic objects (e.g. cars) as well as seasonal and daytime changes. Such invariances are, up to some extent, learnable with existing methods using triplet-like losses, given a large number of diverse training images. However, due to the high algorithmic training complexity, there exists insufficient comparison between different loss functions on large datasets. In this paper, we train and evaluate several localization methods on three different benchmark datasets, including Oxford RobotCar with over one million images. This …
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Tencent PCG（腾讯平台与内容事业群）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
The current state-of-the-art methods for video corpus moment retrieval (VCMR) often use similarity-based feature alignment approach for the sake of convenience and speed. However, late fusion methods like cosine similarity alignment are unable to make full use of the information from both query texts and videos. In this paper, we combine feature alignment with feature fusion to promote the performance on VCMR.
Accurate visual re-localization is very critical to many artificial intelligence applications, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics and autonomous driving. To accomplish this task, we propose an integrated visual re-localization method called RLOCS by combining image retrieval, semantic consistency and geometry verification to achieve accurate estimations. The localization pipeline is designed as a coarse-to-fine paradigm. In the retrieval part, we cascade the architecture of ResNet101-GeM-ArcFace and employ DBSCAN followed by spatial verification to obtain a better initial coa…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Visual localization is a crucial component in the application of mobile robot and autonomous driving. Image retrieval is an efficient and effective technique in image-based localization methods. Due to the drastic variability of environmental conditions, e.g. illumination, seasonal and weather changes, retrieval-based visual localization is severely affected and becomes a challenging problem. In this work, a general architecture is first formulated probabilistically to extract domain invariant feature through multi-domain image translation. And then a novel gradient-weighted similarity activat…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System (HIT)（机器人技术与系统国家重点实验室（哈工大））；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
Visual localization is a crucial problem in mobile robotics and autonomous driving. One solution is to retrieve images with known pose from a database for the localization of query images. However, in environments with drastically varying conditions (e.g. illumination changes, seasons, occlusion, dynamic objects), retrieval-based localization is severely hampered and becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, a novel domain-invariant feature learning method (DIFL) is proposed based on ComboGAN, a multi-domain image translation network architecture. By introducing a feature consistency loss …
