HE-VPR: Height Estimation Enabled Aerial Visual Place Recognition Against Scale Variance

TL;DR

HE-VPR introduces a height-aware visual place recognition framework that improves accuracy and efficiency by decoupling height estimation from place recognition, utilizing lightweight modules and a novel masking strategy.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel height estimation enabled VPR system that reduces training costs and search space, enhancing robustness against scale differences in aerial imagery.

Findings

Up to 6.1% improvement in Recall@1 over state-of-the-art baselines.

Memory usage reduced by up to 90%.

Demonstrated effectiveness on challenging multi-altitude datasets.

Abstract

In this work, we propose HE-VPR, a visual place recognition (VPR) framework that incorporates height estimation. Our system decouples height inference from place recognition, allowing both modules to share a frozen DINOv2 backbone. Two lightweight bypass adapter branches are integrated into our system. The first estimates the height partition of the query image via retrieval from a compact height database, and the second performs VPR within the corresponding height-specific sub-database. The adaptation design reduces training cost and significantly decreases the search space of the database. We also adopt a center-weighted masking strategy to further enhance the robustness against scale differences. Experiments on two self-collected challenging multi-altitude datasets demonstrate that HE-VPR achieves up to 6.1\% Recall@1 improvement over state-of-the-art ViT-based baselines and reduces memory usage by up to 90\%. These results indicate that HE-VPR offers a scalable and efficient solution for height-aware aerial VPR, enabling practical deployment in GNSS-denied environments. All the code and datasets for this work have been released on https://github.com/hmf21/HE-VPR.