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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84 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 71% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. 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

  2. Breaking Déjà Vu: Independent Auditing of Visual Place Recognition through Vision-Language Reasoning

    Jul 14, 2026Sania Waheed, Michael Milford, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn +1Visual Place RecognitionRobot Localization

    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.

  3. PROBE-X: Learning-Free Cross-FOV Place Recognition

    Jul 7, 2026Jinseop LeeLiDAR Place RecognitionVisual Place Recognition

    SK Intellix, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  4. Analysis-by-Proxy: Localization Signals in VLMs Operating as Condition Encoders

    Jul 7, 2026Yoav Baron, Sara Dorfman, Roni Paiss +2Visual Place RecognitionVLM Interpretability

    Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel · Google DeepMind.

  5. SLAM: Structured and Localized Analytic Manifold Adaptation for Lifelong VPR

    Jul 6, 2026Kenta Tsukahara, Kanji Tanaka, Rai HisadaVisual Place RecognitionContinual Learning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Fukui, Fukui 910-8507, Japan

  6. Route-MHT: Multimodal Transformer Guardrails for Thermal Visual Place Recognition

    Jul 6, 2026Zhiyuan Lu, Kanji TanakaThermal ImagingVisual Place Recognition

  7. GeoMix: Descriptor-Free Visual Localization via Global Context and Multi-Detector Training

    Jul 2, 2026Yejun Zhang, Xinjue Wang, Zihan Wang +2Visual Place RecognitionCamera Pose Estimation

    Aalto University, Espoo, Finland · Tampere University, Tampere, Finland · University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

  8. Lost in the Tail: Addressing Geographic Imbalance in Urban Visual Place Recognition

    Jun 30, 2026Zhiyao Shu, Jiacheng Yang, Yang Lu +3Class-Imbalanced LearningLong-Tailed Classification

    George Mason University, Fairfax, USA · Xiamen University, Xiamen, China · University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China +2

  9. From Open Waters to Enclosed Cabins: ProteusVPR for Cross-Scene Visual Place Recognition in Maritime Perception and Cabin Inspection

    Jun 23, 2026Zexi Chen, Zitai Huang, Qiwen Gu +6Visual Place RecognitionRobotics

    Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China · Shanghai Ship and Shipping Research Institute Co.LTD, Shanghai, China · Tongji University, Shanghai, China +2

  10. G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

    Jun 13, 2026Xianyun Jiao, Jingyi Xu, Zhongmiao Yan +2LiDAR Place RecognitionVisual Place Recognition

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · National University of Defense Technology

  11. Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation

    Jun 11, 2026Walter Nedov, Saimunur Rahman, Kavindie Katuwandeniya +3Visual Place RecognitionKnowledge Distillation

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

  12. Cross-Modal Benchmarking for Robotic Perception in Natural Environments

    Jun 10, 2026David Hall, Joshua Knights, Mark Cox +1Metric Depth EstimationVisual Place Recognition

    CSIRO Robotics, CSIRO, Australia. · University of Sydney (USyd), Australia. · Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia.

  13. Meridian: Metric-Semantic Primitive Matching for Cross-View Geo-Localization Beyond Urban Environments

    Jun 4, 2026Mason Peterson, Qingyuan Li, Yixuan Jia +4Cross-View Geo-LocalizationVisual Place Recognition

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. · GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. · U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD 20783, USA.

  14. CIPER: A Unified Framework for Cross-view Image-retrieval and Pose-estimation

    Jun 3, 2026Yurim Jeon, Dongseong Seo, Seung-Woo SeoCross-View Geo-LocalizationVisual Place Recognition

    Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  15. Pinpoint: Grounded Worldwide Image Geolocation via Cross-Source Retrieval and Reranking

    Jun 2, 2026Nika Chuzhoy, Brian Hu, Amit A. Arora +2Cross-View Geo-LocalizationGeospatial Representation Learning

    Virtualitics

  16. FlatVPR: Plug-and-play Geo-linear Residual Adapter for Geometric Rectification of Foundation Model Feature Manifolds

    Jun 1, 2026Rai Hisada, Kanji TanakaVisual Place RecognitionVision Foundation Model Adaptation

    Fundamental Engineering for Knowledge-Based Society, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Fukui, Japan.

  17. One Channel to Rule Them All: Rethinking Input Representation for Visual Place Recognition

    May 31, 2026Timur Ismagilov, Shakaiba Majeed, Michael Milford +3Visual Place RecognitionInvariant Representation Learning

    School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ Southampton, U.K. · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea · QUT Centre for Robotics, School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia +1

  18. DisPlace: Discriminative Place Projections for Multi-Reference Visual Place Recognition

    May 29, 2026Dhyey Manish Rajani, Michael Milford, Tobias FischerVisual Place RecognitionFeature Fusion

    QUT Centre for Robotics, School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics at the Queensland University of Technology.

  19. SAFEVPR: Patch-Based Conformal Verification for Safe Cross-Condition Sequence Visual Place Recognition

    May 27, 2026Ha Sier, Jiaqiang Zhang, Zhuo Zou +2Distribution ShiftVisual Place Recognition

    Turku Intelligent Embedded and Robotic Systems (TIERS) Lab, University of Turku, Turku, Finland · School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

  20. Faster or Stronger: Towards Flexible Visual Place Recognition via Weighted Aggregation and Token Pruning

    May 19, 2026Zichao Zeng, June Moh Goo, Junwei Zheng +4Visual Place RecognitionEfficient ViTs

    University College London, London, UK · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany · Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China +1

  21. KappaPlace: Learning Hyperspherical Uncertainty for Visual Place Recognition via Prototype-Anchored Supervision

    May 19, 2026Maya Yanko, Yoli ShavitVisual Representation LearningVisual Place Recognition

    Faculty of Engineering Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan, Israel

  22. PoseCompass: Intelligent Synthetic Pose Selection for Visual Localization

    May 12, 2026Yanan Zhou, Zhaoyan Qian, Yanli Li +3Visual Place RecognitionCamera Pose Estimation

    The University of Sydney, Australia · University of St Andrews, United Kingdom

  23. MAG-VLAQ: Multi-modal Aerial-Ground Query Aggregation for Cross-View Place Recognition

    May 10, 2026Zhengyi Xu, Yuhang Ming, Zhihao Zhan +3Cross-View Geo-LocalizationVisual Place Recognition

    Hangzhou Dianzi University · TopXGun Robotics · University of Zaragoza

  24. Disambiguating 2D-3D Correspondences in Gaussian Splatting-based Feature Fields for Visual Localization

    May 8, 2026Miso Lee, Sangeek Hyun, Yerim Jeon +13D Gaussian SplattingVisual Place Recognition

    Sungkyunkwan University

  25. egenioussBench: A New Dataset for Geospatial Visual Localisation

    May 6, 2026Phillipp Fanta-Jende, Francesco Vultaggio, Alexander Kern +2Cross-View Geo-LocalizationVisual Place Recognition

    Unit Assistive and Autonomous Systems, Center for Vision, Automation and Control, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria · Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Brunswick, Germany · Institute of Flight Guidance, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Brunswick, Germany

  26. ULF-Loc: Unbiased Landmark Feature for Robust Visual Localization with 3D Gaussian Splatting

    May 6, 2026Yingdong Gu, Shaocheng Yan, Zhenjun Zhao +43D Gaussian SplattingVisual Place Recognition

    Wuhan University · University of Zaragoza · The First Surveying and Mapping Institute of Hunan Province +1

  27. Region Matters: Efficient and Reliable Region-Aware Visual Place Recognition

    Apr 24, 2026Shunpeng Chen, Yukun Song, Changwei Wang +6Visual Representation LearningGeospatial Representation Learning

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China. · Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center, Qilu University of Technology. · Spatialtemporal AI. +1

  28. SCD4VPR: Multi-modal Scene Change Detection for Long-term Visual Place Recognition Database Update

    Apr 13, 2026Diwei Sheng, Vijayraj Gohil, Satyam Gaba +5Semantic Change DetectionVisual Place Recognition

    New York University

  29. AsymLoc: Towards Asymmetric Feature Matching for Efficient Visual Localization

    Apr 10, 2026Mohammad Omama, Gabriele Berton, Eric Foxlin +1Visual Place RecognitionEdge Inference

    The University of Texas at Austin · Work done as a part of a summer internship at Amazon. · Amazon

  30. Towards Lifelong Aerial Autonomy: Geometric Memory Management for Continual Visual Place Recognition in Dynamic Environments

    Apr 10, 2026Xingyu Shao, Zhiqiang Yan, Liangzheng Sun +5Cross-View Geo-LocalizationVisual Place Recognition