Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Rajani, Dhyey Manish, Milford, Michael, Fischer, Tobias
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Rajani, Dhyey Manish
Milford, Michael
Fischer, Tobias
author_facet Rajani, Dhyey Manish
Milford, Michael
Fischer, Tobias
contents Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a key component for localisation in GNSS-denied environments, but its performance critically depends on selecting an image matching threshold (operating point) that balances precision and recall. Thresholds are typically hand-tuned offline for a specific environment and fixed during deployment, leading to degraded performance under environmental change. We propose a method that, given a user-defined precision requirement, automatically selects the operating point of a VPR system to maximise recall. The method uses a small calibration traversal with known correspondences and transfers thresholds to deployment via quantile normalisation of similarity score distributions. This quantile transfer ensures that thresholds remain stable across calibration sizes and query subsets, making the method robust to sampling variability. Experiments with multiple state-of-the-art VPR techniques and datasets show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, delivering up to 25% higher recall in high-precision operating regimes. The method eliminates manual tuning by adapting to new environments and generalising across operating conditions. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_04401
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition
Rajani, Dhyey Manish
Milford, Michael
Fischer, Tobias
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a key component for localisation in GNSS-denied environments, but its performance critically depends on selecting an image matching threshold (operating point) that balances precision and recall. Thresholds are typically hand-tuned offline for a specific environment and fixed during deployment, leading to degraded performance under environmental change. We propose a method that, given a user-defined precision requirement, automatically selects the operating point of a VPR system to maximise recall. The method uses a small calibration traversal with known correspondences and transfers thresholds to deployment via quantile normalisation of similarity score distributions. This quantile transfer ensures that thresholds remain stable across calibration sizes and query subsets, making the method robust to sampling variability. Experiments with multiple state-of-the-art VPR techniques and datasets show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, delivering up to 25% higher recall in high-precision operating regimes. The method eliminates manual tuning by adapting to new environments and generalising across operating conditions. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
title Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04401