A Guide to Structureless Visual Localization

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Panek, Vojtech, Zhou, Qunjie, Ding, Yaqing, Agostinho, Sérgio, Kukelova, Zuzana, Sattler, Torsten, Leal-Taixé, Laura
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Panek, Vojtech
Zhou, Qunjie
Ding, Yaqing
Agostinho, Sérgio
Kukelova, Zuzana
Sattler, Torsten
Leal-Taixé, Laura
author_facet Panek, Vojtech
Zhou, Qunjie
Ding, Yaqing
Agostinho, Sérgio
Kukelova, Zuzana
Sattler, Torsten
Leal-Taixé, Laura
contents Visual localization algorithms, i.e., methods that estimate the camera pose of a query image in a known scene, are core components of many applications, including self-driving cars and augmented / mixed reality systems. State-of-the-art visual localization algorithms are structure-based, i.e., they store a 3D model of the scene and use 2D-3D correspondences between the query image and 3D points in the model for camera pose estimation. While such approaches are highly accurate, they are also rather inflexible when it comes to adjusting the underlying 3D model after changes in the scene. Structureless localization approaches represent the scene as a database of images with known poses and thus offer a much more flexible representation that can be easily updated by adding or removing images. Although there is a large amount of literature on structure-based approaches, there is significantly less work on structureless methods. Hence, this paper is dedicated to providing the, to the best of our knowledge, first comprehensive discussion and comparison of structureless methods. Extensive experiments show that approaches that use a higher degree of classical geometric reasoning generally achieve higher pose accuracy. In particular, approaches based on classical absolute or semi-generalized relative pose estimation outperform very recent methods based on pose regression by a wide margin. Compared with state-of-the-art structure-based approaches, the flexibility of structureless methods comes at the cost of (slightly) lower pose accuracy, indicating an interesting direction for future work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_17636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Guide to Structureless Visual Localization
Panek, Vojtech
Zhou, Qunjie
Ding, Yaqing
Agostinho, Sérgio
Kukelova, Zuzana
Sattler, Torsten
Leal-Taixé, Laura
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.10; I.4.8; I.4.9
Visual localization algorithms, i.e., methods that estimate the camera pose of a query image in a known scene, are core components of many applications, including self-driving cars and augmented / mixed reality systems. State-of-the-art visual localization algorithms are structure-based, i.e., they store a 3D model of the scene and use 2D-3D correspondences between the query image and 3D points in the model for camera pose estimation. While such approaches are highly accurate, they are also rather inflexible when it comes to adjusting the underlying 3D model after changes in the scene. Structureless localization approaches represent the scene as a database of images with known poses and thus offer a much more flexible representation that can be easily updated by adding or removing images. Although there is a large amount of literature on structure-based approaches, there is significantly less work on structureless methods. Hence, this paper is dedicated to providing the, to the best of our knowledge, first comprehensive discussion and comparison of structureless methods. Extensive experiments show that approaches that use a higher degree of classical geometric reasoning generally achieve higher pose accuracy. In particular, approaches based on classical absolute or semi-generalized relative pose estimation outperform very recent methods based on pose regression by a wide margin. Compared with state-of-the-art structure-based approaches, the flexibility of structureless methods comes at the cost of (slightly) lower pose accuracy, indicating an interesting direction for future work.
title A Guide to Structureless Visual Localization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.10; I.4.8; I.4.9
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17636