EffoVPR: Effective Foundation Model Utilization for Visual Place Recognition

Issar Tzachor; Boaz Lerner; Matan Levy; Michael Green; Tal Berkovitz Shalev; Gavriel Habib; Dvir Samuel; Noam Korngut Zailer; Or Shimshi; Nir Darshan; Rami Ben-Ari

arXiv · 2405.18065

EffoVPR: Effective Foundation Model Utilization for Visual Place Recognition

Issar Tzachor·Boaz Lerner·Matan Levy·Michael Green·Tal Berkovitz Shalev·Gavriel Habib·Dvir Samuel·Noam Korngut Zailer·Or Shimshi·Nir Darshan·Rami Ben-Ari

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Abstract

The task of Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is to predict the location of a query image from a database of geo-tagged images. Recent studies in VPR have highlighted the significant advantage of employing pre-trained foundation models like DINOv2 for the VPR task. However, these models are often deemed inadequate for VPR without further fine-tuning on VPR-specific data. In this paper, we present an effective approach to harness the potential of a foundation model for VPR. We show that features extracted from self-attention layers can act as a powerful re-ranker for VPR, even in a zero-shot setting. Our method not only outperforms previous zero-shot approaches but also introduces results competitive with several supervised methods. We then show that a single-stage approach utilizing internal ViT layers for pooling can produce global features that achieve state-of-the-art performance, with impressive feature compactness down to 128D. Moreover, integrating our local foundation features for re-ranking further widens this performance gap. Our method also demonstrates exceptional robustness and generalization, setting new state-of-the-art performance, while handling challenging conditions such as occlusion, day-night transitions, and seasonal variations.

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Issar Tzachor, Boaz Lerner, Matan Levy, Michael Green, Tal Berkovitz Shalev, Gavriel Habib, Dvir Samuel, Noam Korngut Zailer, Or Shimshi, Nir Darshan, Rami Ben-Ari. 2024-05-28. EffoVPR: Effective Foundation Model Utilization for Visual Place Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18065

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