Efficient Visual Place Recognition Through Multimodal Semantic Knowledge Integration

Visual place recognition is crucial for autonomous navigation and robotic mapping. Current methods struggle with perceptual aliasing and computational inefficiency. We present SemVPR, a novel approach integrating multimodal semantic knowledge into VPR. By leveraging a pre-trained vision-language model as a teacher during the training phase, SemVPR learns local visual and semantic descriptors simultaneously, effectively mitigating perceptual aliasing through semantic-aware aggregation without extra inference cost. The proposed nested descriptor learning strategy generates a series of ultra-compact global descriptors, reduced by approximately 66× compared to state-of-the-art methods, in a coarse-to-fine manner, eliminating the need for offline dimensionality reduction or training multiple models. Extensive experiments across various VPR benchmarks demonstrate that SemVPR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significantly lower computational costs, rendering its feasibility for latency-sensitive scenarios in real-world applications.