This repository provides the experiment code for the paper Long-Term Visual Place Recognition Benchmark with View Direction and Data Anonymization Influences.

Here is a graphical user interface (GUI) for using VPR methods on custom datasets: https://github.com/ai4ce/VPR-GUI-Tool

To install requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

1. Image Anonymization

To install mseg-api:

cd segmentation
cd mseg-api
pip install -e .

Make sure that you can run python -c "import mseg" in python.

To install mseg-semantic:

cd segmentation
cd apex
pip install -v --no-cache-dir --global-option="--cpp_ext" --global-option="--cuda_ext" ./

cd ../mseg-semantic
pip install -e .

Make sure that you can run python -c "import mseg_semantic" in python.

Finally:

input_file=/path/to/my/directory
model_name=mseg-3m
model_path=mseg_semantic/mseg-3m.pth
config=mseg_semantic/config/test/default_config_360_ms.yaml
python -u mseg_semantic/tool/universal_demo.py --config=${config} model_name {model_name} model_path ${model_path} input_file ${input_file}

2. Image Filtration

Inside the process folder, use whiteFilter.py to filter images with white pixel percentage.

1. VLAD+SURF

Modify vlad_codebook_generation.py line 157 - 170 to fit the dataset.

cd test/vlad
python vlad_codebook_generation.py
python query_image_closest_image_generation.py

*Notice: the processing may take a few hours.

2. VLAD+SuperPoint

cd test/vlad_SP
python main.py
python find_closest.py

*Notice: the processing may take a few hours.

3. NetVLAD

4. PoseNet

Copy the train_image_paths.txt and test_image_paths.txt to test/posenet.

Obtain the latitude and longtitude of training images and convert them to normalized Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates.

cd test/posenet
python getGPS.py
python mean.py

Start training. This may take several hours. Suggestion: use slurm to run the process.

python train.py --image_path path_to_train_images/ --metadata_path trainNorm.txt

Generate the input file for testing from test_image_paths.txt.

python gen_test_txt.py

Start testing.

python single_test.py --image_path path_to_test_images/ --metadata_path test.txt --weights_path models_trainNorm/best_net.pth

The predicted normalized UTM coordinates of test images is in the image_name.txt. Match the test images with the training images based on their location.

python match.py

The matching result is in the match.txt.

5. DBoW

Copy the train_image_paths.txt and test_image_paths.txt to test/DBow3/utils. Copy and paste the content of test_image_paths.txt at the end of train_image_paths.txt and save the text file as total_images_paths.txt.

Open test/DBow3/utils/demo_general.cpp file. Change the for loop range at line 117 and line 123. Both ranges are the range of lines in total_images_paths.txt. The first for loop range is the range of test images and the second range is the range of training images. To run with multi-thread, you may run the code multiple times with small ranges of test images where the sum of ranges equals to the number of lines in test_image_paths.txt.

Compile and run the code.

cd test/DBow3
cmake .
cd utils
make
./demo_general a b

The result of each test image and its top-5 matched training images is in the output.txt.