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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17168 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17168/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [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)
- [RTAB-Map as an Open-Source Lidar and Visual SLAM Library for Large-Scale and Long-Term Online Operation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06341/) (2024)
- [MegaLoc: One Retrieval to Place Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17237/) (2025)
- [Ultralytics YOLO26: Unified Real-Time End-to-End Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03748/) (2026)
- [4Seasons: A Cross-Season Dataset for Multi-Weather SLAM in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06364/) (2020)
- [iBoW-LCD: An Appearance-based Loop Closure Detection Approach using Incremental Bags of Binary Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05909/) (2018)
- [PP-OCRv5: A Specialized 5M-Parameter Model Rivaling Billion-Parameter Vision-Language Models on OCR Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24373/) (2026)
- [SEG-JPEG: Simple Visual Semantic Communications for Remote Operation of Automated Vehicles over Unreliable Wireless Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15258/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.