OmniVLoc: Topo-metric Visual Localization for Omnidirectional Cameras

Effective Visual Localization (VL) requires a map of the environment that combines compactness for efficient scalability with robustness against visual appearance changes and metric precision. Through low-dimensional image embeddings, Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is able to successfully meet the first two requirements, but its low metric accuracy makes it less suitable than standard VL approaches based on local features or neural representations. This limitation can be overcome by integrating VPR with the accurate local trajectory estimates produced by feed-forward neural 3D geometry (FF3D) models. In this paper, we address sequential appearance-based localization through a topometric framework that iteratively combines probabilistic VPR with FF3D metric pose estimation in controlled image sets. Our approach proposes an automatic offline mapping tool that models the topometric pose-appearance interaction in the different parts of the scene. This map is later employed by an online particle filter that estimates the pose from odometry and belief over places for FF3D inference, successfully incorporating neural metric estimation into probabilistic appearance-based localization. We extensively evaluate the framework on three known benchmarks, demonstrating substantial improvements over existing appearance-based methods. The modularity of our approach allows the descriptor extractor and FF3D model to remain interchangeable, and a focused analysis further shows that sequential belief can mitigate severe failures under perceptual aliasing.

Relative camera pose is a basic geometric cue for visual re-localization and scene understanding. When using images alone, visual evidence may not sufficiently support reliable estimation of 3D-consistent motion. The challenge is especially acute in unfamiliar and ever-changing environments for real-time applications, where a system must infer spatial structure under tight time constraints from what it sees rather than rely on scene-specific reconstruction or training. This raises a fundamental question: how can live 3D camera motion be estimated accurately for re-localization in unseen environments while drawing on enough scene context to resolve pose ambiguity? We introduce MultiLoc, a multi-view-guided relative pose regressor trained at scale to achieve spatial and geometric consistent representations for robust visual re-localization in unseen scenarios with high inference speed. Specifically, MultiLoc creates a minimal 3D-sub-scene representation of the environment and efficiently transforms it into 3D spatially and geometrically consistent features in a single forward pass, enabling precise pose estimates with high inference speed gains. Across diverse indoor, outdoor, and in-the-wild visual re-localization benchmarks---Indoor6, Cambridge Landmarks and WaySpots---MultiLoc consistently outperforms state-of-the-art relative pose regression methods. We also highlight that MultiLoc, a pose regressor, also performs competitively with inference-heavy and structure-based approaches while retaining sub-second inference and generalizing to unseen scenes. Given a small posed support set, it also surpasses relative pose regression, feature-matching, and non-regression methods on several relative camera pose benchmarks. Code will be released.

Metric Cross-View Geo-Localization (MCVGL) aims to estimate the 3-DoF camera pose (position and heading) by matching ground and satellite images. In this work, instead of pinhole and satellite images, we study robust MCVGL using holistic panoramas and OpenStreetMap (OSM). To this end, we establish a large-scale MCVGL benchmark dataset, CV-RHO, with over 2.7M images under different weather and lighting conditions, as well as sensor noise. Furthermore, we propose a model termed RHO with a two-branch Pin-Pan architecture for accurate visual localization. A Split-Undistort-Merge (SUM) module is introduced to address the panoramic distortion, and a Position-Orientation Fusion (POF) mechanism is designed to enhance the localization accuracy. Extensive experiments prove the value of our CV-RHO dataset and the effectiveness of the RHO model, with a significant performance gain up to 20% compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. Project page: https://github.com/InSAI-Lab/RHO.