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arXiv · 2603.13917

Evaluation of Visual Place Recognition Methods for Image Pair Retrieval in 3D Vision and Robotics

Dennis Haitz·Athradi Shritish Shetty·Michael Weinmann·Markus Ulrich
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Abstract

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a core component in computer vision, typically formulated as an image retrieval task for localization, mapping, and navigation. In this work, we instead study VPR as an image pair retrieval front-end for registration pipelines, where the goal is to find top-matching image pairs between two disjoint image sets for downstream tasks such as scene registration, SLAM, and Structure-from-Motion. We comparatively evaluate state-of-the-art VPR families - NetVLAD-style baselines, classification-based global descriptors (CosPlace, EigenPlaces), feature-mixing (MixVPR), and foundation-model-driven methods (AnyLoc, SALAD, MegaLoc) - on three challenging datasets: object-centric outdoor scenes (Tanks and Temples), indoor RGB-D scans (ScanNet-GS), and autonomous-driving sequences (KITTI). We show that modern global descriptor approaches are increasingly suitable as off-the-shelf image pair retrieval modules in challenging scenarios including perceptual aliasing and incomplete sequences, while exhibiting clear, domain-dependent strengths and weaknesses that are critical when choosing VPR components for robust mapping and registration.

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Dennis Haitz, Athradi Shritish Shetty, Michael Weinmann, Markus Ulrich. 2026-03-14. Evaluation of Visual Place Recognition Methods for Image Pair Retrieval in 3D Vision and Robotics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13917

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