Determining the precise geographic location of an image at a global scale remains an unsolved challenge. Standard image retrieval techniques are inefficient due to the sheer volume of images (>100M) and fail when coverage is insufficient. Scalable solutions, however, involve a trade-off: global classification typically yields coarse results (10+ kilometers), while cross-view retrieval between ground and aerial imagery suffers from a domain gap and has been primarily studied on smaller regions. This paper introduces a hybrid approach that achieves fine-grained geo-localization across a large geographic expanse the size of a continent. We leverage a proxy classification task during training to learn rich feature representations that implicitly encode precise location information. We combine these learned prototypes with embeddings of aerial imagery to increase robustness to the sparsity of ground-level data. This enables direct, fine-grained retrieval over areas spanning multiple countries. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates that our approach can localize within 200m more than 68\% of queries of a dataset covering a large part of Europe. The code is publicly available at [scaling-geoloc.github.io](https://scaling-geoloc.github.io).

Semantic 2D maps are commonly used by humans and machines for navigation purposes, whether it's walking or driving. However, these maps have limitations: they lack detail, often contain inaccuracies, and are difficult to create and maintain, especially in an automated fashion. Can we use _raw imagery_ to automatically create _better maps_ that can be easily interpreted by both humans and machines? We introduce SNAP, a deep network that learns rich 2D _neural_ maps from ground-level and overhead images. We train our model to align neural maps estimated from different inputs, supervised only with camera poses over tens of millions of StreetView images. SNAP can resolve the location of challenging image queries beyond the reach of traditional methods, outperforming the state of the art in localization by a large margin. Moreover, our neural maps encode not only geometry and appearance but also high-level semantics, discovered without explicit supervision. This enables effective pre-training for data-efficient semantic scene understanding, with the potential to unlock cost-efficient creation of more detailed maps.

Existing unsupervised methods for keypoint learning rely heavily on the assumption that a specific keypoint type (e.g. elbow, digit, abstract geometric shape) appears only once in an image. This greatly limits their applicability, as each instance must be isolated before applying the method—an issue that is never discussed or evaluated. We thus propose a novel method to learn Task-agnostic, UnSupervised Keypoints (TUSK) which can deal with multiple instances. To achieve this, instead of the commonly-used strategy of detecting multiple heatmaps, each dedicated to a specific keypoint type, we use a single heatmap for detection, and enable unsupervised learning of keypoint types through clustering. Specifically, we encode semantics into the keypoints by teaching them to reconstruct images from a sparse set of keypoints and their descriptors, where the descriptors are forced to form distinct clusters in feature space around learned prototypes. This makes our approach amenable to a wider range of tasks than any previous unsupervised keypoint method: we show experiments on multiple-instance detection and classification, object discovery, and landmark detection—all unsupervised—with performance on par with the state of the art, while also being able to deal with multiple instances.

Outlier rejection and, equivalently, inlier set optimization is a key ingredient in numerous applications in computer vision such as filtering point-matches in camera pose estimation or plane and normal estimation in point clouds. Several approaches exist, yet at large scale we face a combinatorial explosion of possible solutions and state-of-the-art methods like RANSAC, Hough transform, or Branch&Bound require a minimum inlier ratio or prior knowledge to remain practical. In fact, for problems such as camera posing in very large scenes these approaches become useless as they have exponential runtime growth.To approach the problem, we present an efficient and general algorithm for outlier rejection based on “intersecting” k-dimensional surfaces in Rd. We provide a recipe for formulating a variety of geometric problems as finding a point in Rdwhich maximizes the number of nearby surfaces (and thus inliers). The resulting algorithm has linear worst-case complexity with a better runtime dependency on the requested proximity of a query to its result than competing algorithms, while not requiring domain specific bounds. This is achieved by introducing a space decomposition scheme that bounds the number of computations by successively rounding and grouping surfaces. Our recipe and open-source code1enables anybody to derive such fast approaches to new problems across a wide range of domains. We demonstrate the approach on several camera posing problems with a large number of matches and low inlier ratio, achieving state-of-the-art results at significantly lower processing times.

We propose a novel framework for finding correspondences in images based on a deep neural network that, given two images and a query point in one of them, finds its correspondence in the other. By doing so, one has the option to query only the points of interest and retrieve sparse correspondences, or to query all points in an image and obtain dense mappings. Importantly, in order to capture both local and global priors, and to let our model relate between image regions using the most relevant among said priors, we realize our network using a transformer. At inference time, we apply our correspondence network by recursively zooming in around the estimates, yielding a multiscale pipeline able to provide highly-accurate correspondences. Our method significantly outperforms the state of the art on both sparse and dense correspondence problems on multiple datasets and tasks, ranging from wide-baseline stereo to optical flow, without any retraining for a specific dataset. We commit to releasing data, code, and all the tools necessary to train from scratch and ensure reproducibility.

Encouraged by the recent progress in pedestrian detection, we investigate the gap between current state-of-the-art methods and the "perfect single frame detector". We enable our analysis by creating a human baseline for pedestrian detection (over the Caltech pedestrian dataset). After manually clustering the frequent errors of a top detector, we characterise both localisation and background-versus-foreground errors. To address localisation errors we study the impact of training annotation noise on the detector performance, and show that we can improve results even with a small portion of sanitised training data. To address background/foreground discrimination, we study convnets for pedestrian detection, and discuss which factors affect their performance. Other than our in-depth analysis, we report top performance on the Caltech pedestrian dataset, and provide a new sanitised set of training and test annotations.

Semantic labelling and instance segmentation are two tasks that require particularly costly annotations. Starting from weak supervision in the form of bounding box detection annotations, we propose a new approach that does not require modification of the segmentation training procedure. We show that when carefully designing the input labels from given bounding boxes, even a single round of training is enough to improve over previously reported weakly supervised results. Overall, our weak supervision approach reaches ~95% of the quality of the fully supervised model, both for semantic labelling and instance segmentation.

Object detectors have hugely profited from moving towards an end-to-end learning paradigm: proposals, features, and the classifier becoming one neural network improved results two-fold on general object detection. One indispensable component is non-maximum suppression (NMS), a post-processing algorithm responsible for merging all detections that belong to the same object. The de facto standard NMS algorithm is still fully hand-crafted, suspiciously simple, and - being based on greedy clustering with a fixed distance threshold - forces a trade-off between recall and precision. We propose a new network architecture designed to perform NMS, using only boxes and their score. We report experiments for person detection on PETS and for general object categories on the COCO dataset. Our approach shows promise providing improved localization and occlusion handling.

Encouraged by the recent progress in pedestrian detection, we investigate the gap between current state-of-the-art methods and the "perfect single frame detector". We enable our analysis by creating a human baseline for pedestrian detection (over the Caltech dataset), and by manually clustering the recurrent errors of a top detector. Our results characterise both localisation and background-versusforeground errors. To address localisation errors we study the impact of training annotation noise on the detector performance, and show that we can improve even with a small portion of sanitised training data. To address background/foreground discrimination, we study convnets for pedestrian detection, and discuss which factors affect their performance. Other than our in-depth analysis, we report top performance on the Caltech dataset, and provide a new sanitised set of training and test annotations.

Current top performing object detectors employ detection proposals to guide the search for objects, thereby avoiding exhaustive sliding window search across images. Despite the popularity and widespread use of detection proposals, it is unclear which trade-offs are made when using them during object detection. We provide an in-depth analysis of twelve proposal methods along with four baselines regarding proposal repeatability, ground truth annotation recall on PASCAL, ImageNet, and MS COCO, and their impact on DPM, R-CNN, and Fast R-CNN detection performance. Our analysis shows that for object detection improving proposal localisation accuracy is as important as improving recall. We introduce a novel metric, the average recall (AR), which rewards both high recall and good localisation and correlates surprisingly well with detection performance. Our findings show common strengths and weaknesses of existing methods, and provide insights and metrics for selecting and tuning proposal methods.

In this paper we study the use of convolutional neural networks (convnets) for the task of pedestrian detection. Despite their recent diverse successes, convnets historically underperform compared to other pedestrian detectors. We deliberately omit explicitly modelling the problem into the network (e.g. parts or occlusion modelling) and show that we can reach competitive performance without bells and whistles. In a wide range of experiments we analyse small and big convnets, their architectural choices, parameters, and the influence of different training data, including pretraining on surrogate tasks. We present the best convnet detectors on the Caltech and KITTI dataset. On Caltech our convnets reach top performance both for the Caltech1x and Caltech10x training setup. Using additional data at training time our strongest convnet model is competitive even to detectors that use additional data (optical flow) at test time.

We present GyroPen, a method to reconstruct the motion path for pen-like interaction from standard built-in sensors in modern smartphones. The key idea is to reconstruct a representation of the trajectory of the phone's corner that is touching a writing or drawing surface from the measurements obtained from the phone's gyroscopes and accelerometers. We propose to directly use the angular trajectory for this reconstruction, which removes the necessity for accurate absolute 3-D position estimation, a task that can be difficult using low-cost accelerometers. We connect GyroPen to a handwriting recognition system and perform two proof-of-concept experiments to demonstrate that the reconstruction accuracy of GyroPen is accurate enough to be a promising approach to text entry. In a first experiment, the average novice participant (n=10) was able to write the first word only 37 s after the starting to use GyroPen for the first time. In a second experiment, experienced users (n=2) were able to write at the speed of 3-4 s for one English word and with a character error rate of 18%.