Visual Place Recognition

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Overview

Visual Place Recognition studies how robots and other systems identify previously visited locations from images, supporting localization, navigation, and loop closure in SLAM. Methods range from global descriptors learned with CNNs or vision transformers to local feature matching and geometric verification; sequence models also use motion and temporal context. Multimodal approaches combine images with depth, LiDAR, event cameras, language, or aerial imagery, and are evaluated across driving, indoor, campus, and natural-scene settings using retrieval and pose metrics. A central challenge is generalizing beyond familiar urban conditions while keeping systems efficient and reliable when scenes change, viewpoints differ, or visual matches are ambiguous.

Latest papers

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83 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, down 27% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. LateMatch: Breaking the Interaction Bottleneck via Cacheable Matching for Efficient Visual Localization

    Oct 18, 2026Mohammad Omama, Aeyan Ashraf, Sandeep ChinchaliImage MatchingVisual Place Recognition

    The University of Texas at Austin · University of Massachusetts Amherst

  2. HyperLoop: Hyperspectral-Assisted Loop Closure Detection in 3D-SLAM for Planetary Exploration

    Oct 14, 2026Annie Bhalla, Dennis Rotondi, Riccardo Giubilato +2Loop Closure DetectionSpace Robotics

    Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI), University of Stuttgart, Universitätsstraße 32, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany. · German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, 82234 Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.

  3. Removing the Compute Bottleneck for Event-based Visual Place Recognition with Spiking Neural Networks

    Oct 12, 2026Somayeh Hussaini, Tobias Fischer, Michael MilfordVisual Place RecognitionEfficient Neural Network Inference

  4. 4MT-VLM: How Coarse Is a VLMs Cognitive Map?

    Sep 30, 2026Markus FreyVLM EvaluationSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks

    Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence · Fraunhofer IAIS, University of Bonn

  5. Large-Scale Geometric Map-Based Localization of UAVs in GNSS-Denied Urban Environments

    Sep 23, 2026Garth Terlizzi, Kaveh FathianGNSS-Denied LocalizationMap-Based Localization

    Department of Computer Science, Colorado School of Mines

  6. Geometry-Conditioned Visual Place Recognition in Natural Environments

    Sep 23, 2026Walter Nedov, Saimunur Rahman, Kavindie Katuwandeniya +3Visual Representation LearningVisual Place Recognition

    CSIRO Robotics, CSIRO, Australia · Queensland University of Technology, Australia

  7. TM-APR: Thermal Temporal-Memory Localization via Analytic Online Adaptation

    Sep 22, 2026Yanshuo Bai, Kanji TanakaClass-Incremental LearningVisual Place Recognition

  8. Calibrating Retrieval Geometry: Reliability-Guided Training-Free Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition

    Sep 22, 2026Xin Li, Zhimin Mao, Shang Wang +2Visual Place RecognitionFeature Fusion

    Key Laboratory of Spectral Imaging Technology CAS, Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an, 710119, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

  9. M3GA-Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Modal Multi-session Ground-to-Aerial Place Recognition in Forests

    Sep 19, 2026Ethan Griffiths, Maryam Haghighat, Simon Denman +2Visual Place RecognitionLiDAR Place Recognition

    Queensland University of Technology (QUT) · CSIRO Robotics

  10. VideoReloc: Long-Term Indoor Video Relocalization against a Kilobyte-Scale Semantic Scene Graph

    Sep 18, 2026Qianru Li, Xuyang Chen, Xuqin Wang +6Camera Pose EstimationMap-Based Localization

    Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · Huawei Hilbert Research Center (Dresden), Germany

  11. Multi-viewpoint Geo-localization with Event Cameras

    Sep 18, 2026Adam D. Hines, Michael Milford, Tobias FischerVisual Place RecognitionEvent-Based Vision

    QUT Centre for Robotics, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane QLD 4001

  12. SlugTrails: An Egocentric Benchmark for Floor Plan Localization in Large Buildings

    Sep 17, 2026Yunqian Cheng, Roberto ManduchiFloor-Plan-Based Visual LocalizationVisual Place Recognition

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA, USA

  13. HuMemSLAM: Efficient Human-Inspired Semantic Place Recognition for Robust Visual SLAM

    Sep 15, 2026Mayowa Adebambo, Sebastian Donnelly, Armand Amaritei +2Visual Place RecognitionVisual SLAM

    School of Engineering, Computing & Mathematics, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK. · Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Transport Group, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK.

  14. DXPR: Depth-Based Vision-LiDAR Cross-Modal Place Recognition Using Vision Foundation Models

    Sep 8, 2026Yungsoo Han, Youngseok Jang, Seungwon Roh +2LiDAR Place RecognitionVisual Place Recognition

    Department of Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. · InnoCORE AI-Transformed Aerospace Research Center, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea. · Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

  15. TRAIL: Trajectory-Aware Visual Place Recognition against Unordered Databases

    Sep 7, 2026Dominik A. Kloepfer, Patrick WenzelVisual Place Recognition

    Visual Geometry Group (VGG), University of Oxford · Helsing

  16. AdaptVPR: Route-Aware Hard Positive Generation for Robust Visual Place Recognition

    Sep 3, 2026Shunpeng Chen, Jingyi Zhang, Changwei Wang +6Visual Place RecognitionSynthetic Data Augmentation

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center, Qilu University of Technology

  17. AutoCompass: Accurate Visual Localization on Public Maps by Learning from Weak Labels

    Sep 2, 2026Javier Tirado-Garín, Alan Savio Paul, Shuai Chen +5Learning with Noisy LabelsWeakly Supervised Learning

    I3A, Universidad de Zaragoza · Niantic Spatial · University of Oxford

  18. POI-Loc: A Fine-Grained POI Localization Benchmark and an Asymmetric Global-to-Local Matching Method

    Sep 2, 2026Lu Han, Xiting Sun, Hao Wang +4Image MatchingVisual Place Recognition

    Amap, Alibaba Group, Beijing, China

  19. Spotter: Efficient Urban Visual Localization via Geo-Referenced Facade Landmarks in GPS-Degraded Environments

    Aug 24, 2026Antoni Valls, Jordi Sanchez-RieraGNSS-Denied LocalizationMap-Based Localization

    Institut de Rob`otica i Inform`atica Industrial, CSIC-UPC, Llorens i Artigas 4-6, 08028 Barcelona, Spain

  20. What Does CLIP Learn for Regional Geolocalization? Probing Visual Cues and Scene Configuration After Adaptation

    Aug 22, 2026Changyu Lee, Yeonsoo Park, Abdullah Alfarrarjeh +1Geospatial Representation LearningVisual Place Recognition

    University of Southern California Los Angeles, USA · USC IMSC San Francisco, USA · German Jordanian University Amman, Jordan +1

  21. YILDIZ-VPR: A Novel Dataset with Dense Coverage Under Diverse Environmental Conditions for Visual Place Recognition

    Aug 17, 2026Serdar Yildiz, Abbas Memiş, Songül VarliVisual Place Recognition

    Department of Computer Engineering Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Türkiye · BILGEM, TUBITAK, Gebze, Kocaeli, Türkiye · Department of Computer Engineering Istanbul University, Istanbul, Türkiye

  22. HistReNeRF: Historic Image Relocalisation within Contemporary Neural Radiance Field Reconstructions

    Aug 15, 2026Benjamin T. Hughes, Stuart JamesCamera Pose EstimationVisual Place Recognition

    Durham University, Durham, UK

  23. GeoUniPR: A Geometry-Consistent Unified Framework for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

    Aug 10, 2026Wonbong Kim, Jiatong Xiao, Rui Li +5Cross-Modal Representation LearningLiDAR Place Recognition

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai, China · Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous System, Tongji University, Shanghai, China · MOE Key Lab of Embedded System and Service Computing, Tongji University, Shanghai, China +1

  24. SeqLoc: Beyond the Single Frame for Cross-View Geo-Localization in Feature-Sparse Scenes

    Aug 8, 2026Junwei Zheng, Yun Huang, Ruize Dai +8Cross-View Geo-LocalizationVisual Place Recognition

    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany · Hunan University, Changsha, China · University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

  25. Are Visual Place Recognition Models Recognizing Places or Conditions? Distractor-Augmented Evaluation and Condition Suppression

    Aug 7, 2026Beomsu Kim, Minwoo Jung, Giseop KimVisual Place RecognitionRetrieval Robustness

    Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, DGIST, Daegu, Republic of Korea · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  26. Topometric Autonomous Vehicle Localization by Combining Visual Embeddings and Feed-Forward 3D Models

    Aug 6, 2026Eulogio Quemada-Torres, Alberto Jaenal, Francisco-Angel Moreno +1Visual Place RecognitionMap-Based Localization

    Machine Perception and Intelligent Robotics Group (MAPIR), Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, Malaga Institute for Mechatronics Engineering and Cyber-Physical Systems (IMECH.UMA), University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain · Robotics, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence Group (RoPeRT), Aragon Institute for Engineering Research (I3A), University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

  27. RIM: A Retrieval-In-Matching Framework for Cross-Domain Global Visual Localization of UAVs

    Jul 22, 2026Xin Li, Siyuan Duan, Shang Wang +3Cross-View Geo-LocalizationVisual Place Recognition

    Key Laboratory of Spectral Imaging Technology CAS, Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an, 710119, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

  28. Are All Tokens Necessary for Visual Place Recognition? An Empirical Study of Token Reduction for Efficient Inference

    Jul 17, 2026Tong Jin, Yunpeng Liu, Shuyu Hu +4Visual Place RecognitionEfficient ViTs

    Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. · Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology.

  29. Selectivity Drives Efficiency: Dataset Pruning for Visual Place Recognition

    Jul 16, 2026Tong Jin, Yunpeng Liu, Shuyu Hu +3Dataset PruningVisual Place Recognition

    Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China · Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518071, China +1

  30. Visual Place Recognition Using Rate-Encoded Spiking Neural Networks with Discrete STDP Learning

    Jul 15, 2026Altzi Tsanko, Oikonomou Katerina Maria, Antonios GasteratosVisual Place RecognitionSpiking Neural Networks

    Department of Production and Management Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, Xanthi 67100, Greece