# Revisit Anything: Visual Place Recognition via Image Segment Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16650/) (2023)
- [Fast Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12156/) (2023)
- [Large-Scale Image Retrieval with Attentive Deep Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06321/) (2016)
- [Patch-NetVLAD: Multi-Scale Fusion of Locally-Global Descriptors for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01486/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Oxford and Paris: Large-Scale Image Retrieval Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11285/) (2018)
- [Learning with Average Precision: Training Image Retrieval with a Listwise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07589/) (2019)
- [Attention to Scale: Scale-aware Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03339/) (2015)
- [AM-RADIO: Agglomerative Vision Foundation Model -- Reduce All Domains Into One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06709/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Optimal Transport Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15937/) (2023)
- [EigenPlaces: Training Viewpoint Robust Models for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10832/) (2023)
- [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)
- [GSV-Cities: Toward Appropriate Supervised Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10239/) (2022)
- [GOAT: GO to Any Thing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06430/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Semantics for Robotic Mapping, Perception and Interaction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00443/) (2021)
- [Instance-Specific Image Goal Navigation: Training Embodied Agents to Find Object Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15876/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [O-MaMa: Learning Object Mask Matching between Egocentric and Exocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06026/) (2025)
- [TANGO: Traversability-Aware Navigation with Local Metric Control for Topological Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08699/) (2025)
- [ObjectReact: Learning Object-Relative Control for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09594/) (2025)
- [SegMASt3R: Geometry Grounded Segment Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05051/) (2025)
- [VGGT-MPR: VGGT-Enhanced Multimodal Place Recognition in Autonomous Driving Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19735/) (2026)
- [Faster or Stronger: Towards Flexible Visual Place Recognition via Weighted Aggregation and Token Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20551/) (2026)
- [Agentic Aerial Cinematography: From Dialogue Cues to Cinematic Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16176/) (2025)
- [Region Matters: Efficient and Reliable Region-Aware Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22390/) (2026)
- [From Limited Labels to Open Domains:An Efficient Learning Method for Drone-view Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07520/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Geo-localization for Crowdsourced Flood Imagery via LLM-Guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11811/) (2025)
- [QdaVPR: A novel query-based domain-agnostic model for visual place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07414/) (2026)
- [Unifying UAV Cross-View Geo-Localization via 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01747/) (2026)
- [Z-FLoc: Zero-Shot Floorplan Localization via Geometric Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04788/) (2026)
- [CQVPR: Landmark-aware Contextual Queries for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08170/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Hierarchical Re-Localization in OpenStreetMap via Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01613/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Human-in-the-Loop Object Retrieval with Pre-Trained Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00809/) (2026)
- [From Open Waters to Enclosed Cabins: ProteusVPR for Cross-Scene Visual Place Recognition in Maritime Perception and Cabin Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24234/) (2026)
- [M3GA-Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Modal Multi-session Ground-to-Aerial Place Recognition in Forests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23003/) (2026)
- [Calibrating Retrieval Geometry: Reliability-Guided Training-Free Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25937/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurately recognizing a revisited place is crucial for embodied agents to localize and navigate. This requires visual representations to be distinct, despite strong variations in camera viewpoint and scene appearance. Existing visual place recognition pipelines encode the "whole" image and search for matches. This poses a fundamental challenge in matching two images of the same place captured from different camera viewpoints: "the similarity of what overlaps can be dominated by the dissimilarity of what does not overlap". We address this by encoding and searching for "image segments" instead of the whole images. We propose to use open-set image segmentation to decompose an image into `meaningful' entities (i.e., things and stuff). This enables us to create a novel image representation as a collection of multiple overlapping subgraphs connecting a segment with its neighboring segments, dubbed SuperSegment. Furthermore, to efficiently encode these SuperSegments into compact vector representations, we propose a novel factorized representation of feature aggregation. We show that retrieving these partial representations leads to significantly higher recognition recall than the typical whole image based retrieval. Our segments-based approach, dubbed SegVLAD, sets a new state-of-the-art in place recognition on a diverse selection of benchmark datasets, while being applicable to both generic and task-specialized image encoders. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our method to ``revisit anything'' by evaluating our method on an object instance retrieval task, which bridges the two disparate areas of research: visual place recognition and object-goal navigation, through their common aim of recognizing goal objects specific to a place. Source code: https://github.com/AnyLoc/Revisit-Anything.