# PanoVPR: Towards Unified Perspective-to-Equirectangular Visual Place Recognition via Sliding Windows across the Panoramic View

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Patch-NetVLAD: Multi-Scale Fusion of Locally-Global Descriptors for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01486/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Visual Geo-localization for Large-Scale Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02287/) (2022)
- [TransVPR: Transformer-based place recognition with multi-level attention aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02001/) (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)
- [Deep Learning for Instance Retrieval: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11282/) (2021)
- [GeoDesc: Learning Local Descriptors by Integrating Geometry Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06294/) (2018)
- [Review on Panoramic Imaging and Its Applications in Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05570/) (2022)
- [Omnidirectional CNN for Visual Place Recognition and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04228/) (2018)
- [NYU-VPR: Long-Term Visual Place Recognition Benchmark with View Direction and Data Anonymization Influences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09004/) (2021)
- [Panoramic Annular Localizer: Tackling the Variation Challenges of Outdoor Localization Using Panoramic Annular Images and Active Deep Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05425/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SPVLoc: Semantic Panoramic Viewport Matching for 6D Camera Localization in Unseen Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10527/) (2024)
- [Fire360: A Benchmark for Robust Perception and Episodic Memory in Degraded 360-Degree Firefighting Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02167/) (2025)
- [EI-Nexus: Towards Unmediated and Flexible Inter-Modality Local Feature Extraction and Matching for Event-Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21743/) (2024)
- [HypeVPR: Exploring Hyperbolic Space for Perspective to Equirectangular Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04764/) (2025)
- [Joint Multi-Condition Representation Modelling via Matrix Factorisation for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17739/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual place recognition has gained significant attention in recent years as a crucial technology in autonomous driving and robotics. Currently, the two main approaches are the perspective view retrieval (P2P) paradigm and the equirectangular image retrieval (E2E) paradigm. However, it is practical and natural to assume that users only have consumer-grade pinhole cameras to obtain query perspective images and retrieve them in panoramic database images from map providers. To address this, we propose textitPanoVPR, a perspective-to-equirectangular (P2E) visual place recognition framework that employs sliding windows to eliminate feature truncation caused by hard cropping. Specifically, PanoVPR slides windows over the entire equirectangular image and computes feature descriptors for each window, which are then compared to determine place similarity. Notably, our unified framework enables direct transfer of the backbone from P2P methods without any modification, supporting not only CNNs but also Transformers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we derive the Pitts250k-P2E dataset from the Pitts250k and establish YQ360, latter is the first P2E visual place recognition dataset collected by a mobile robot platform aiming to simulate real-world task scenarios better. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanoVPR achieves state-of-the-art performance and obtains 3.8% and 8.0% performance gain on Pitts250k-P2E and YQ360 compared to the previous best method, respectively. Code and datasets will be publicly available at https://github.com/zafirshi/PanoVPR.