54.4CVMay 29
DisPlace: Discriminative Place Projections for Multi-Reference Visual Place RecognitionDhyey Manish Rajani, Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer
A key challenge in Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is matching query images against reference maps captured under diverse environmental conditions and viewpoints. While multiple reference traversals improve robustness, existing fusion strategies either aggregate references uniformly or rely on heuristic selection, without distinguishing descriptor variations that preserve stable place identity from those caused by changing conditions or viewpoints. In this paper, we propose DisPlace, a multi-reference VPR framework that fuses multiple reference descriptors into a single compact and discriminative place representation. DisPlace formulates descriptor fusion as a generalized eigenvalue problem that maximizes between-place separability while suppressing within-place variation across references, rather than preserving overall descriptor variance. Unlike existing multi-reference fusion methods, DisPlace exploits variation across reference traversals to identify which linear combinations of descriptor dimensions preserve place identity and which capture condition- or viewpoint-specific variation. We evaluate DisPlace on Oxford RobotCar, Nordland, Pittsburgh30k, and Google Landmarks v2 across six state-of-the-art VPR descriptors. DisPlace outperforms seven multi-reference baselines in 49 out of 54 appearance-varying conditions, consistently improves descriptor-level fusion performance under viewpoint and unstructured settings, and requires less storage during inference than all compared fusion methods.
ROFeb 4
Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place RecognitionDhyey Manish Rajani, Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a key component for localisation in GNSS-denied environments, but its performance critically depends on selecting an image matching threshold (operating point) that balances precision and recall. Thresholds are typically hand-tuned offline for a specific environment and fixed during deployment, leading to degraded performance under environmental change. We propose a method that, given a user-defined precision requirement, automatically selects the operating point of a VPR system to maximise recall. The method uses a small calibration traversal with known correspondences and transfers thresholds to deployment via quantile normalisation of similarity score distributions. This quantile transfer ensures that thresholds remain stable across calibration sizes and query subsets, making the method robust to sampling variability. Experiments with multiple state-of-the-art VPR techniques and datasets show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, delivering up to 25% higher recall in high-precision operating regimes. The method eliminates manual tuning by adapting to new environments and generalising across operating conditions. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
CVApr 27, 2023
OriCon3D: Effective 3D Object Detection using Orientation and ConfidenceDhyey Manish Rajani, Surya Pratap Singh, Rahul Kashyap Swayampakula
In this paper, we propose an advanced methodology for the detection of 3D objects and precise estimation of their spatial positions from a single image. Unlike conventional frameworks that rely solely on center-point and dimension predictions, our research leverages a deep convolutional neural network-based 3D object weighted orientation regression paradigm. These estimates are then seamlessly integrated with geometric constraints obtained from a 2D bounding box, resulting in derivation of a comprehensive 3D bounding box. Our novel network design encompasses two key outputs. The first output involves the estimation of 3D object orientation through the utilization of a discrete-continuous loss function. Simultaneously, the second output predicts objectivity-based confidence scores with minimal variance. Additionally, we also introduce enhancements to our methodology through the incorporation of lightweight residual feature extractors. By combining the derived estimates with the geometric constraints inherent in the 2D bounding box, our approach significantly improves the accuracy of 3D object pose determination, surpassing baseline methodologies. Our method is rigorously evaluated on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark, demonstrating superior performance.