Papers › GSV-Cities: Toward Appropriate Supervised Visual Place Recognition

GSV-Cities: Toward Appropriate Supervised Visual Place Recognition

19 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.10239archive 2025-07-28

Amar Ali-bey, Brahim Chaib-Draa, Philippe Giguère

This paper aims to investigate representation learning for large scale visual place recognition, which consists of determining the location depicted in a query image by referring to a database of reference images. This is a challenging task due to the large-scale environmental changes that can occur over time (i.e., weather, illumination, season, traffic, occlusion). Progress is currently challenged by the lack of large databases with accurate ground truth. To address this challenge, we introduce GSV-Cities, a new image dataset providing the widest geographic coverage to date with highly accurate ground truth, covering more than 40 cities across all continents over a 14-year period. We subsequently explore the full potential of recent advances in deep metric learning to train networks specifically for place recognition, and evaluate how different loss functions influence performance. In addition, we show that performance of existing methods substantially improves when trained on GSV-Cities. Finally, we introduce a new fully convolutional aggregation layer that outperforms existing techniques, including GeM, NetVLAD and CosPlace, and establish a new state-of-the-art on large-scale benchmarks, such as Pittsburgh, Mapillary-SLS, SPED and Nordland. The dataset and code are available for research purposes at https://github.com/amaralibey/gsv-cities.

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Tasks

Image RetrievalMetric LearningVisual LocalizationVisual Place Recognition

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Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

GSV-Cities

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Visual Place Recognition Mapillary val Conv-AP Recall@1 83.4 #13 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Place Recognition Mapillary val Conv-AP Recall@10 92.3 #13 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Place Recognition Mapillary val Conv-AP Recall@5 90.5 #13 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Place Recognition Nordland Conv-AP Recall@1 38.5 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Place Recognition Nordland Conv-AP Recall@5 53.9 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Place Recognition Pittsburgh-250k-test Conv-AP Recall@1 92.4 #10 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Place Recognition Pittsburgh-250k-test Conv-AP Recall@10 98.6 #10 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Place Recognition Pittsburgh-250k-test Conv-AP Recall@5 97.6 #10 of 13 Archive leaderboard report

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