2022/03/24 by Qunjie Zhou, Sérgio Agostinho, Zhou, Qunjie +5 · 5 citations
Computer Science · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · #3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.12979
openalex publication_date 2022/03/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we propose to go beyond the well-established approach to vision-based localization that relies on visual descriptor matching between a query image and a 3D point cloud. While matching keypoints via visual descriptors makes localization highly accurate, it has significant storage demands, raises privacy concerns and requires update to the descriptors in the long-term. To elegantly address those practical challenges for large-scale localization, we present GoMatch, an alternative to visual-based matching that solely relies on geometric information for matching image keypoints to maps, represented as sets of bearing vectors. Our novel bearing vectors representation of 3D points, significantly relieves the cross-modal challenge in geometric-based matching that prevented prior work to tackle localization in a realistic environment. With additional careful architecture design, GoMatch improves over prior geometric-based matching work with a reduction of (10.67m,95.7deg) and (1.43m, 34.7deg) in average median pose errors on Cambridge Landmarks and 7-Scenes, while requiring as little as 1.5/1.7% of storage capacity in comparison to the best visual-based matching methods. This confirms its potential and feasibility for real-world localization and opens the door to future efforts in advancing city-scale visual localization methods that do not require storing visual descriptors.