Deep Visual Geo-localization Benchmark

Gabriele Moreno Berton, Riccardo Mereu, Gabriele Trivigno, Carlo Masone, Gabriela Csurka, Torsten Sattler, Barbara Caputo

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new open-source benchmarkingframeworkfor Visual Geo-localization (VG) that allows to build, train, and test a wide range of commonly used ar-chitectures, with the flexibility to change individual components of a geo-localization pipeline. The purpose of this framework is twofold: i) gaining insights into how differ-ent components and design choices in a VG pipeline im-pact the final results, both in terms of performance (re-call@N metric) and system requirements (such as execution time and memory consumption); ii) establish a system-atic evaluation protocol for comparing different methods. Using the proposed framework, we perform a large suite of experiments which provide criteria for choosing back-bone, aggregation and negative mining depending on the use-case and requirements. We also assess the impact of engineering techniques like pre/post-processing, data aug-mentation and image resizing, showing that better performance can be obtained through somewhat simple procedures: for example, downscaling the images' resolution to 80% can lead to similar results with a 36% savings in ex-traction time and dataset storage requirement. Code and trained models are available at dataset storage requirement. https://deep-vg-bench.herokuapp.com/.