# NPR: Nocturnal Place Recognition in Streets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00276 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00276/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01804/) (2020)
- [Patch-NetVLAD: Multi-Scale Fusion of Locally-Global Descriptors for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01486/) (2021)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Visual Geo-localization for Large-Scale Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02287/) (2022)
- [Geometry-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks for One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05852/) (2018)
- [Self-supervising Fine-grained Region Similarities for Large-scale Image Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03926/) (2020)
- [TransVPR: Transformer-based place recognition with multi-level attention aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02001/) (2022)
- [VPR-Bench: An Open-Source Visual Place Recognition Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Viewpoint and Appearance Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08135/) (2020)
- [LaMAR: Benchmarking Localization and Mapping for Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10770/) (2022)
- [GSV-Cities: Toward Appropriate Supervised Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10239/) (2022)
- [One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00826/) (2017)
- [Deep Visual Geo-localization Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03444/) (2022)
- [Multitask AET with Orthogonal Tangent Regularity for Dark Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03346/) (2022)
- [Night-to-Day Image Translation for Retrieval-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09767/) (2018)
- [Instance-wise Hard Negative Example Generation for Contrastive Learning in Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04547/) (2021)
- [Viewpoint Invariant Dense Matching for Visual Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09827/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Landmark Retrieval/Recognition under a Noisy and Diverse Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04087/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is the task of retrieving database images similar to a query photo by comparing it to a large database of known images. In real-world applications, extreme illumination changes caused by query images taken at night pose a significant obstacle that VPR needs to overcome. However, a training set with day-night correspondence for city-scale, street-level VPR does not exist. To address this challenge, we propose a novel pipeline that divides VPR and conquers Nocturnal Place Recognition (NPR). Specifically, we first established a street-level day-night dataset, NightStreet, and used it to train an unpaired image-to-image translation model. Then we used this model to process existing large-scale VPR datasets to generate the VPR-Night datasets and demonstrated how to combine them with two popular VPR pipelines. Finally, we proposed a divide-and-conquer VPR framework and provided explanations at the theoretical, experimental, and application levels. Under our framework, previous methods can significantly improve performance on two public datasets, including the top-ranked method.