HuMemSLAM: Efficient Human-Inspired Semantic Place Recognition for Robust Visual SLAM

Autonomous systems require reliable place recognition for efficient and effective simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). Traditional geometric visual SLAM approaches rely on low-level features and geometric consistency, but remain vulnerable to perceptual aliasing, where different places appear similar, and perceptual variation, where the same place appears different. Although semantic SLAM and modern learned visual place recognition (VPR) methods improve robustness under challenging perceptual conditions, real-time deployment requires both high retrieval accuracy and low latency. Inspired by human memory and perception, we propose HuMem-VPR, which exploits the bidirectional relationship between bottom-up perceptual evidence and top-down contextual reasoning to achieve high-level place understanding. We further introduce HuMemSLAM, the integration of HuMem-VPR with ORB-SLAM3. HuMem VPR achieved the highest aggregate retrieval accuracy on the real-image benchmark, competitive accuracy on the CARLA benchmark, and approximately two to three times lower latency than the evaluated state-of-the-art VPR methods. Across the evaluated dataset families and online experiments, HuMemSLAM substantially improved integrated Recall @1 over ORB-SLAM3's native retrieval while reducing the proposals submitted to its geometric backend.