To Match or Not to Match: Revisiting Image Matching for Reliable Visual Place Recognition

Davide Sferrazza, Gabriele Berton, Gabriele Trivigno, Carlo Masone; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) Workshops, 2025, pp. 2849-2860

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a critical task in computer vision, traditionally enhanced by re-ranking retrieval results with image matching. However, recent advancements in VPR methods have significantly improved performance, challenging the necessity of re-ranking. In this work, we show that modern retrieval systems often reach a point where re-ranking can degrade results, as current VPR datasets are largely saturated. We propose using image matching as a verification step to assess retrieval confidence, demonstrating that inlier counts can reliably predict when re-ranking is beneficial. Our findings shift the paradigm of retrieval pipelines, offering insights for more robust and adaptive VPR systems.