# LoST? Appearance-Invariant Place Recognition for Opposite Viewpoints using Visual Semantics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05526 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05526/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00688/) (2023)
- [Where is your place, Visual Place Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06443/) (2021)
- [SeqNet: Learning Descriptors for Sequence-based Hierarchical Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11603/) (2021)
- [Semantics for Robotic Mapping, Perception and Interaction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00443/) (2021)
- [Near-field Perception for Low-Speed Vehicle Automation using Surround-view Fisheye Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17001/) (2021)
- [RoRD: Rotation-Robust Descriptors and Orthographic Views for Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08573/) (2021)
- [Revisit Anything: Visual Place Recognition via Image Segment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18049/) (2024)
- [Improving Visual Place Recognition Performance by Maximising Complementarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08416/) (2021)
- [A Hierarchical Dual Model of Environment- and Place-Specific Utility for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02440/) (2021)
- [Dataset and Benchmark: Novel Sensors for Autonomous Vehicle Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13853/) (2024)
- [MultiRes-NetVLAD: Augmenting Place Recognition Training with Low-Resolution Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09146/) (2022)
- [Place recognition survey: An update on deep learning approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10458/) (2021)
- [An Efficient and Scalable Collection of Fly-inspired Voting Units for Visual Place Recognition in Changing Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10986/) (2021)
- [SwitchHit: A Probabilistic, Complementarity-Based Switching System for Improved Visual Place Recognition in Changing Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00591/) (2022)
- [MSSPlace: Multi-Sensor Place Recognition with Visual and Text Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15663/) (2024)
- [ObjectReact: Learning Object-Relative Control for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09594/) (2025)
- [Patch-NetVLAD+: Learned patch descriptor and weighted matching strategy for place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05738/) (2022)
- [VLAD-BuFF: Burst-aware Fast Feature Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19293/) (2024)
- [ReF -- Rotation Equivariant Features for Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05206/) (2022)
- [On Model-Free Re-ranking for Visual Place Recognition with Deep Learned Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18573/) (2024)
- [A Novel Image Descriptor with Aggregated Semantic Skeleton Representation for Long-term Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03677/) (2022)
- [Weatherproofing Retrieval for Localization with Generative AI and Geometric Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09237/) (2024)
- [SeqNetVLAD vs PointNetVLAD: Image Sequence vs 3D Point Clouds for Day-Night Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11481/) (2021)
- [Merging Classification Predictions with Sequential Information for Lightweight Visual Place Recognition in Changing Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00834/) (2022)
- [A Complementarity-Based Switch-Fuse System for Improved Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00714/) (2023)
- [An Evaluation and Ranking of Different Voting Schemes for Improved Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05705/) (2023)
- [Locking On: Leveraging Dynamic Vehicle-Imposed Motion Constraints to Improve Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17529/) (2023)
- [SymboSLAM: Semantic Map Generation in a Multi-Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15504/) (2024)
- [Scalable and Efficient Hierarchical Visual Topological Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05023/) (2024)
- [SPOT: Point Cloud Based Stereo Visual Place Recognition for Similar and Opposing Viewpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12339/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human visual scene understanding is so remarkable that we are able to recognize a revisited place when entering it from the opposite direction it was first visited, even in the presence of extreme variations in appearance. This capability is especially apparent during driving: a human driver can recognize where they are when travelling in the reverse direction along a route for the first time, without having to turn back and look. The difficulty of this problem exceeds any addressed in past appearance- and viewpoint-invariant visual place recognition (VPR) research, in part because large parts of the scene are not commonly observable from opposite directions. Consequently, as shown in this paper, the precision-recall performance of current state-of-the-art viewpoint- and appearance-invariant VPR techniques is orders of magnitude below what would be usable in a closed-loop system. Current engineered solutions predominantly rely on panoramic camera or LIDAR sensing setups; an eminently suitable engineering solution but one that is clearly very different to how humans navigate, which also has implications for how naturally humans could interact and communicate with the navigation system. In this paper we develop a suite of novel semantic- and appearance-based techniques to enable for the first time high performance place recognition in this challenging scenario. We first propose a novel Local Semantic Tensor (LoST) descriptor of images using the convolutional feature maps from a state-of-the-art dense semantic segmentation network. Then, to verify the spatial semantic arrangement of the top matching candidates, we develop a novel approach for mining semantically-salient keypoint correspondences.