Learning Scene Geometry for Visual Localization in Challenging Conditions

Nathan Piasco, Désiré Sidibé, Valérie Gouet-Brunet, Cédric Demonceaux

Abstract: We propose a new approach for outdoor large scale image based localization that can deal with challenging scenarios like cross-season, cross-weather, day/night and long-term localization. The key component of our method is a new learned global image descriptor, that can effectively benefit from scene geometry information during training. At test time, our system is capable of inferring the depth map related to the query image and use it to increase localization accuracy. We are able to increase recall@1 performances by 2.15% on cross-weather and long-term localization scenario and by 4.24% points on a challenging winter/summer localization sequence versus state-of-the-art methods. Our method can also use weakly annotated data to localize night images across a reference dataset of daytime images.