Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) presented a novel way to represent scenes, allowing for high-quality 3D reconstruction from 2D images. Following its remarkable achievements, global localization within NeRF maps is an essential task for enabling a wide range of applications. Recently, Loc-NeRF demonstrated a localization approach that combines traditional Monte Carlo Localization with NeRF, showing promising results for using NeRF as an environment map. However, despite its advancements, Loc-NeRF encounters the challenge of a time-intensive ray rendering process, which can be a significant limitation in practical applications. To address this issue, we introduce Fast Loc-NeRF, which enhances efficiency and accuracy in NeRF map-based global localization. We propose a particle rejection weighting strategy that estimates the uncertainty of particles by leveraging NeRF's inherent characteristics and incorporates them into the particle weighting process to reject abnormal particles. Additionally, Fast Loc-NeRF employs a coarse-to-fine approach, matching rendered pixels and observed images across multiple resolutions from low to high. As a result, it speeds up the costly particle update process while enhancing precise localization results. Our Fast Loc-NeRF establishes new state-of-the-art localization performance on several bench-marks, demonstrating both its accuracy and efficiency. The code is available at this url.

In this paper, we propose a novel image retrieval network named Correlation Verification Network (CVNet) to replace the conventional geometric re-ranking with a 4D convolutional neural network that learns diverse geometric matching possibilities. To enable efficient cross-scale matching, we construct feature pyramids and establish cross-scale feature correlations in a single inference, thereby replacing the costly multi-scale inference. Additionally, we employ curriculum learning with the Hide-and-Seek strategy to handle challenging samples. Our proposed CVNet demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on several image retrieval benchmarks by a large margin. From an implementation perspective, however, CVNet has one drawback: it requires high memory usage because it needs to store dense features of all database images. This high memory requirement can be a significant limitation in practical applications. To address this issue, we introduce an extension of CVNet called Dense-to-Sparse CVNet (CVNet), which can significantly reduce memory usage by sparsifying the features of the database images. The sparsification module in CVNet learns to select the relevant parts of image features end-to-end using a Gumbel estimator. Since the sparsification is performed offline, CVNet does not increase online extraction and matching times. CVNet dramatically reduces the memory footprint while preserving performance levels nearly identical to CVNet.

Despite advances in global image representation, existing image retrieval approaches rarely consider geometric structure during the global retrieval stage. In this work, we revisit the conventional self-similarity descriptor from a convolutional perspective, to encode both the visual and structural cues of the image to global image representation. Our proposed network, named Structural Embedding Network (SENet), captures the internal structure of the images and gradually compresses them into dense self-similarity descriptors while learning diverse structures from various images. These self-similarity descriptors and original image features are fused and then pooled into global embedding, so that global embedding can represent both geometric and visual cues of the image. Along with this novel structural embedding, our proposed network sets new state-of-the-art performances on several image retrieval benchmarks, convincing its robustness to look-alike distractors. The code and models are available: https://github.com/sungonce/SENet.

We present a new domain generalized semantic segmentation network named WildNet, which learns domain-generalized features by leveraging a variety of contents and styles from the wild. In domain generalization, the low generalization ability for unseen target domains is clearly due to overfitting to the source domain. To address this problem, previous works have focused on generalizing the domain by removing or diversifying the styles of the source domain. These alleviated overfitting to the source-style but overlooked overfitting to the source-content. In this paper, we propose to diversify both the content and style of the source domain with the help of the wild. Our main idea is for networks to naturally learn domain-generalized semantic information from the wild. To this end, we diversify styles by augmenting source features to resemble wild styles and enable networks to adapt to a variety of styles. Further-more, we encourage networks to learn class-discriminant features by providing semantic variations borrowed from the wild to source contents in the feature space. Finally, we regularize networks to capture consistent semantic information even when both the content and style of the source domain are extended to the wild. Extensive experiments on five different datasets validate the effectiveness of our WildNet, and we significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods. The source code and model are available online: https://github.com/suhyeonlee/WildNet.

Geometric verification is considered a de facto solution for the re-ranking task in image retrieval. In this study, we propose a novel image retrieval re-ranking network named Correlation Verification Networks (CVNet). Our proposed network, comprising deeply stacked 4D convolutional layers, gradually compresses dense feature correlation into image similarity while learning diverse geometric matching patterns from various image pairs. To enable cross-scale matching, it builds feature pyramids and constructs cross-scale feature correlations within a single inference, replacing costly multi-scale inferences. In addition, we use curriculum learning with the hard negative mining and Hide-and-Seek strategy to handle hard samples without losing generality. Our proposed re-ranking network shows state-of-the-art performance on several retrieval benchmarks with a significant margin (+12.6% in mAP on ROxford-Hard+1M set) over state-of-the-art methods. The source code and models are available online: ht tps: / /gi thub. com/ sungonce/CVNet.

We present Hierarchical Memory Matching Network (HMMN) for semi-supervised video object segmentation. Based on a recent memory-based method [33], we propose two advanced memory read modules that enable us to perform memory reading in multiple scales while exploiting temporal smoothness. We first propose a kernel guided memory matching module that replaces the non-local dense memory read, commonly adopted in previous memory-based methods. The module imposes the temporal smoothness constraint in the memory read, leading to accurate memory retrieval. More importantly, we introduce a hierarchical memory matching scheme and propose a top-k guided memory matching module in which memory read on a fine-scale is guided by that on a coarse-scale. With the module, we perform memory read in multiple scales efficiently and leverage both high-level semantic and low-level fine-grained memory features to predict detailed object masks. Our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the validation sets of DAVIS 2016/2017 (90.8% and 84.7%) and YouTube-VOS 2018/2019 (82.6% and 82.5%), and test-dev set of DAVIS 2017 (78.6%). The source code and model are available online: https://github.com/Hongje/HMMN.