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Dilated Superpixel Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition

Zeng, Zichao; Goo, June Moh; Boehm, Jan; (2025) Dilated Superpixel Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters , 11 (2) pp. 2002-2009. 10.1109/lra.2025.3645658. Green open access

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Abstract

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a fundamental task in robotics and computer vision, enabling systems to identify locations seen in the past using visual information. Previous state-of-the-art approach focuses on encoding and retrieving semantically meaningful supersegment representations of images to significantly enhance recognition recall rates. However, we find that they struggle to cope with significant variations in viewpoint and scale, as well as scenes with sparse or limited information. Furthermore, these semantic-driven supersegment representations often exclude semantically meaningless yet valuable pixel information. In this work, we present Sel-V and MuSSel-V, two efficient variants within the segment-level VPR paradigm that replace heavy and fragmented supersegments with lightweight, visually compact and complete dilated superpixels for local feature aggregation. The use of superpixels preserves pixel-level details while reducing computational overhead. A multi-scale extension further enhances robustness to viewpoint and scale changes. Comprehensive experiments on twelve public benchmarks show that our approach achieves a better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency than existing segment-based methods. These results demonstrate that lightweight, non-semantic segmentation can serve as an effective alternative for high-performance, resource efficient visual place recognition in robotics.

Type: Article
Title: Dilated Superpixel Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/lra.2025.3645658
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/lra.2025.3645658
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. It has been made open access under the Creative Commons (CC BY) licence under the terms of the UCL Intellectual Property (IP) Policy and UCL Publications Policy.
Keywords: Localization, Vision-Based Navigation, Visual Place Recognition, Superpixel, Aggregation
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Civil, Environ and Geomatic Eng
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10219677
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