Optimal Transport Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition
Authors: Sergio Izquierdo, Javier Civera

The task of Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to match a query image against references from an extensive database of images from different places relying solely on visual cues. State-of-the-art pipelines focus on the aggregation of features extracted from a deep backbone in order to form a global descriptor for each image. In this context we introduce SALAD (Sinkhorn Algorithm for Locally Aggregated Descriptors) which reformulates NetVLAD's soft-assignment of local features to clusters as an optimal transport problem. In SALAD we consider both feature-to-cluster and cluster-to-feature relations and we also introduce a dustbin cluster designed to selectively discard features deemed non-informative enhancing the overall descriptor quality. Additionally we leverage and fine-tune DINOv2 as a backbone which provides enhanced description power for the local features and dramatically reduces the required training time. As a result our single-stage method not only surpasses single-stage baselines in public VPR datasets but also surpasses two-stage methods that add a re-ranking with significantly higher cost.