CricaVPR: Cross-image Correlation-aware Representation Learning for Visual Place Recognition

Feng Lu, Xiangyuan Lan, Lijun Zhang, Dongmei Jiang, Yaowei Wang, Chun Yuan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 16772-16782

Over the past decade most methods in visual place recognition (VPR) have used neural networks to produce feature representations. These networks typically produce a global representation of a place image using only this image itself and neglect the cross-image variations (e.g. viewpoint and illumination) which limits their robustness in challenging scenes. In this paper we propose a robust global representation method with cross-image correlation awareness for VPR named CricaVPR. Our method uses the attention mechanism to correlate multiple images within a batch. These images can be taken in the same place with different conditions or viewpoints or even captured from different places. Therefore our method can utilize the cross-image variations as a cue to guide the representation learning which ensures more robust features are produced. To further facilitate the robustness we propose a multi-scale convolution-enhanced adaptation method to adapt pre-trained visual foundation models to the VPR task which introduces the multi-scale local information to further enhance the cross-image correlation-aware representation. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin with significantly less training time. The code is released at https://github.com/Lu-Feng/CricaVPR.