The Overlooked Value of Test-time Reference Sets in Visual Place Recognition

Mubariz Zaffar, Liangliang Nan, Sebastian Scherer, Julian F. P. Kooij; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2025, pp. 7234-7243

Given a query image, Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is the task of retrieving an image of the same place from a reference database with robustness to viewpoint and appearance changes. Recent works show that some VPR benchmarks are solved by methods using Vision-Foundation-Model backbones and trained on large-scale and diverse VPR-specific datasets. Several benchmarks remain challenging, particularly when the test environments differ significantly from the usual VPR training datasets. We propose a complementary, unexplored source of information to bridge the train-test domain gap, which can further improve the performance of State-of-the-Art (SOTA) VPR methods on such challenging benchmarks. Concretely, we identify that the test-time reference set, the "map", contains images and poses of the target domain, and must be available before the test-time query is received in several VPR applications. Therefore, we propose to perform simple Reference-Set-Finetuning (RSF) of VPR models on the map, boosting the SOTA ( 2.3% increase on-average for Recall@1) on these challenging datasets. Finetuned models retain generalization, and RSF works across diverse test datasets.