Outdoor visual localization is a crucial component to many computer vision systems. We propose an approach to localization from images that is designed to explicitly handle the strong variations in appearance happening between daytime and nighttime. As revealed by recent long-term localization benchmarks, both traditional feature-based and retrieval-based approaches still struggle to handle such changes. Our novel localization method combines a state-of-the-art image retrieval architecture with condition-specific sub-networks allowing the computation of global image descriptors that are explicitly dependent of the capturing conditions. We show that our approach improves localization by a factor of almost 300 compared to the popular VLAD-based methods on nighttime localization.
Robust global descriptors can be obtained by aggregation of local features in the image. VLAD @cite_71 is a popular descriptor, computed by summing and concatenating many descriptors for affine-invariant regions. DenseVLAD @cite_49 modified the VLAD architecture by densely sampling RootSIFT @cite_77 descriptors in the image. Recent learning-based variants cast the task of image retrieval as a metric learning problem. NetVLAD @cite_62 defines a differentiable VLAD layer as the final activation of a siamese network. While never explicitly applied to visual localization, activations such as max-pooling (MAC) @cite_31 @cite_61 , sum-pooling (SPoC) @cite_25 , weighted sum-pooling (CroW) @cite_20 or regional max-pooling (R-MAC) @cite_74 coupled with siamese or triplet architectures, have shown to outperform VLAD-based methods in image-retrieval tasks @cite_23 . The Generalized-Mean-Pooling (GeM) @cite_37 layer proposes a hybrid activation, which combines the benefits of average and max-pooling, and achieves state-the-art results in outdoor visual search @cite_23 .
@cite_61 @cite_37 @cite_62 @cite_77 @cite_49 @cite_71 @cite_74 @cite_23 @cite_31 @cite_25 @cite_20
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The objective of this paper is large scale object instance retrieval, given a query image. A starting point of such systems is feature detection and description, for example using SIFT. The focus of this paper, however, is towards very large scale retrieval where, due to storage requirements, very compact image descriptors are required and no information about the original SIFT descriptors can be accessed directly at run time. We start from VLAD, the state-of-the art compact descriptor introduced by for this purpose, and make three novel contributions: first, we show that a simple change to the normalization method significantly improves retrieval performance, second, we show that vocabulary adaptation can substantially alleviate problems caused when images are added to the dataset after initial vocabulary learning. These two methods set a new state-of-the-art over all benchmarks investigated here for both mid-dimensional (20k-D to 30k-D) and small (128-D) descriptors. Our third contribution is a multiple spatial VLAD representation, MultiVLAD, that allows the retrieval and localization of objects that only extend over a small part of an image (again without requiring use of the original image SIFT descriptors). Visual search and image retrieval underpin numerous applications, however the task is still challenging predominantly due to the variability of object appearance and ever increasing size of the databases, often exceeding billions of images. Prior art methods rely on aggregation of local scale-invariant descriptors, such as SIFT, via mechanisms including Bag of Visual Words (BoW), Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) and Fisher Vectors (FV). However, their performance is still short of what is required. This paper presents a novel method for deriving a compact and distinctive representation of image content called Robust Visual Descriptor with Whitening (RVD-W). It significantly advances the state of the art and delivers world-class performance. In our approach local descriptors are rank-assigned to multiple clusters. Residual vectors are then computed in each cluster, normalized using a direction-preserving normalization function and aggregated based on the neighborhood rank. Importantly, the residual vectors are de-correlated and whitened in each cluster before aggregation, leading to a balanced energy distribution in each dimension and significantly improved performance. We also propose a new post-PCA normalization approach which improves separability between the matching and non-matching global descriptors. This new normalization benefits not only our RVD-W descriptor but also improves existing approaches based on FV and VLAD aggregation. Furthermore, we show that the aggregation framework developed using hand-crafted SIFT features also performs exceptionally well with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based features. The RVD-W pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art global descriptors on both the Holidays and Oxford datasets. On the large scale datasets, Holidays1M and Oxford1M, SIFT-based RVD-W representation obtains a mAP of 45.1 and 35.1 percent, while CNN-based RVD-W achieve a mAP of 63.5 and 44.8 percent, all yielding superior performance to the state-of-the-art. Recent works on image retrieval have proposed to index images by compact representations encoding powerful local descriptors, such as the closely related VLAD and Fisher vector. By combining such a representation with a suitable coding technique, it is possible to encode an image in a few dozen bytes while achieving excellent retrieval results. This paper revisits some assumptions proposed in this context regarding the handling of "visual burstiness", and shows that ad-hoc choices are implicitly done which are not desirable. Focusing on VLAD without loss of generality, we propose to modify several steps of the original design. Albeit simple, these modifications significantly improve VLAD and make it compare favorably against the state of the art. In recent years, VLAD has become a popular method which encoding powerful local descriptors to the compact representations. By using this approach, an image can be represented by just a few dozen bytes while preserving excellent retrieval results after the dimensionality reduction and compression. However, throwing away the spatial information is one of the biggest weaknesses of VLAD. This paper adopts the spatial pyramid pooling method to incorporate the spatial information into the VLAD vectors. Furthermore, a new normalization method is proposed to hold this advantage. By the proposed method, the performance of VLAD can be boosted through combining spatial information. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms VLAD in almost all configurations.