# VPR-Bench: An Open-Source Visual Place Recognition Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Viewpoint and Appearance Change

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.08135 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08135/

## Key facts

- Cited by 101 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 101)

- [Rethinking Visual Geo-localization for Large-Scale Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02287/) (2022)
- [AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00688/) (2023)
- [MixVPR: Feature Mixing for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02190/) (2023)
- [EigenPlaces: Training Viewpoint Robust Models for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10832/) (2023)
- [GSV-Cities: Toward Appropriate Supervised Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10239/) (2022)
- [Deep Visual Geo-localization Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03444/) (2022)
- [Where is your place, Visual Place Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06443/) (2021)
- [ALIKE: Accurate and Lightweight Keypoint Detection and Descriptor Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02906/) (2021)
- [BoQ: A Place is Worth a Bag of Learnable Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07364/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Day-Night Domain Adaptation with a Physics Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05137/) (2021)
- [Data-efficient Large Scale Place Recognition with Graded Similarity Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11739/) (2023)
- [Visual Place Recognition: A Tutorial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03281/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Assignment for Geometry Aware Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08427/) (2022)
- [SceneGraphLoc: Cross-Modal Coarse Visual Localization on 3D Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00469/) (2024)
- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04812/) (2024)
- [Are Local Features All You Need for Cross-Domain Visual Place Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05887/) (2023)
- [Revisit Anything: Visual Place Recognition via Image Segment Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18049/) (2024)
- [On the Estimation of Image-matching Uncertainty in Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00546/) (2024)
- [Focus on Local: Finding Reliable Discriminative Regions for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09881/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Spiking Neural Networks for Visual Place Recognition via Weighted Neuronal Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06452/) (2021)
- [VPAIR -- Aerial Visual Place Recognition and Localization in Large-scale Outdoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11567/) (2022)
- [Pair-VPR: Place-Aware Pre-training and Contrastive Pair Classification for Visual Place Recognition with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06614/) (2024)
- [MultiRes-NetVLAD: Augmenting Place Recognition Training with Low-Resolution Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09146/) (2022)
- [BioSLAM: A Bio-inspired Lifelong Memory System for General Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14543/) (2022)
- [An Efficient and Scalable Collection of Fly-inspired Voting Units for Visual Place Recognition in Changing Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10986/) (2021)
- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards the Real-world Autonomy Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04497/) (2022)
- [Design Space Exploration of Low-Bit Quantized Neural Networks for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09028/) (2023)
- [Swarm Intelligence in Geo-Localization: A Multi-Agent Large Vision-Language Model Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11312/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is the process of recognising a previously visited place using visual information, often under varying appearance conditions and viewpoint changes and with computational constraints. VPR is related to the concepts of localisation, loop closure, image retrieval and is a critical component of many autonomous navigation systems ranging from autonomous vehicles to drones and computer vision systems. While the concept of place recognition has been around for many years, VPR research has grown rapidly as a field over the past decade due to improving camera hardware and its potential for deep learning-based techniques, and has become a widely studied topic in both the computer vision and robotics communities. This growth however has led to fragmentation and a lack of standardisation in the field, especially concerning performance evaluation. Moreover, the notion of viewpoint and illumination invariance of VPR techniques has largely been assessed qualitatively and hence ambiguously in the past. In this paper, we address these gaps through a new comprehensive open-source framework for assessing the performance of VPR techniques, dubbed "VPR-Bench". VPR-Bench (Open-sourced at: https://github.com/MubarizZaffar/VPR-Bench) introduces two much-needed capabilities for VPR researchers: firstly, it contains a benchmark of 12 fully-integrated datasets and 10 VPR techniques, and secondly, it integrates a comprehensive variation-quantified dataset for quantifying viewpoint and illumination invariance. We apply and analyse popular evaluation metrics for VPR from both the computer vision and robotics communities, and discuss how these different metrics complement and/or replace each other, depending upon the underlying applications and system requirements.