Jul 14, 2026, cs.CVJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Sania Waheed, Michael Milford, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Shoaib Ehsan
School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, U.K. · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia · School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, CO4 3SQ Colchester, U.K.
Visual place recognition (VPR) is a key enabler of accurate localization and long-term autonomous navigation in robotics applications, such as loop closure detection for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). However, real-world VPR deployment relies on selecting an image matching threshold that balances precision and recall. These thresholds are typically tuned using labeled validation data and fixed during deployment, making them unreliable under environmental changes where ground truth is unavailable. This is particularly problematic in safety-critical robotics, where accepting a false loop closure can corrupt the estimated trajectory and map. In this work, we introduce Visual Place Recognition Auditing, an independent post-retrieval verification framework that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to assess retrieved matches by reasoning jointly over query and candidate images. Unlike conventional verification methods, our approach performs instance-level verification without requiring architecture-specific confidence measures, dataset-dependent thresholds, or prior knowledge of the deployment environment. We evaluate our method on six benchmark datasets using five state-of-the-art VPR methods and four VLMs. Results show that VLM-based auditing improves recall@1 by 13.6% on average as compared to state-of-the-art methods while reducing false acceptance rates to 12%, maintaining precision above 95% and coverage above 75%.