Visual localization enables autonomous vehicles to navigate in their surroundings and augmented reality applications to link virtual to real worlds. Practical visual localization approaches need to be robust to a wide variety of viewing condition, including day-night changes, as well as weather and seasonal variations, while providing highly accurate 6 degree-of-freedom (6DOF) camera pose estimates. In this paper, we introduce the first benchmark datasets specifically designed for analyzing the impact of such factors on visual localization. Using carefully created ground truth poses for query images taken under a wide variety of conditions, we evaluate the impact of various factors on 6DOF camera pose estimation accuracy through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art localization approaches. Based on our results, we draw conclusions about the difficulty of different conditions, showing that long-term localization is far from solved, and propose promising avenues for future work, including sequence-based localization approaches and the need for better local features. Our benchmark is available at visuallocalization.net.

This paper introduces a new algorithmic technique for solving certain problems in geometric computer vision. The main novelty of the method is a branch-andbound search over rotation space, which is used in this paper to determine camera orientation. By searching over all possible rotations, problems can be reduced to known fixedrotation problems for which optimal solutions have been previously given. In particular, a method is developed for the estimation of the essential matrix, giving the first guaranteed optimal algorithm for estimating the relative pose using a cost function based on reprojection errors. Recently convex optimization techniques have been shown to provide optimal solutions to many of the common problems in structure from motion. However, they do not apply to problems involving rotations. The search method described in this paper allows such problems to be solved optimally. Apart from the essential matrix, the algorithm is applied to the camera pose problem, providing an optimal algorithm. The approach has been implemented and tested on a number of both synthetically generated and real data sets with good performance.

This paper presents a new framework for solving geometric structure and motion problems based on Linfinity-norm. Instead of using the common sum-of-squares cost-function, that is, the L2-norm, the model-fitting errors are measured using the L-norm. Unlike traditional methods based on L2, our framework allows for efficient computation of global estimates. We show that a variety of structure and motion problems, for example, triangulation, camera resectioning and homography estimation can be recast as quasi-convex optimization problems within this framework. These problems can be efficiently solved using Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP) which is a standard technique in convex optimization. The methods have been implemented in Matlab and the resulting toolbox has been made publicly available. The algorithms have been validated on real data in different settings on problems with small and large dimensions and with excellent performance.

We consider the problem of localizing a novel image in a large 3D model, given that the gravitational vector is known. In principle, this is just an instance of camera pose estimation, but the scale of the problem introduces some interesting challenges. Most importantly, it makes the correspondence problem very difficult so there will often be a significant number of outliers to handle. To tackle this problem, we use recent theoretical as well as technical advances. Many modern cameras and phones have gravitational sensors that allow us to reduce the search space. Further, there are new techniques to efficiently and reliably deal with extreme rates of outliers. We extend these methods to camera pose estimation by using accurate approximations and fast polynomial solvers. Experimental results are given demonstrating that it is possible to reliably estimate the camera pose despite cases with more than 99 percent outlier correspondences in city-scale models with several millions of 3D points.