Benchmarking 6DOF Urban Visual Localization in Changing Conditions

Visual localization enables autonomous vehicles to navigate in their surroundings and Augmented Reality applications to link virtual to real worlds. In order to be practically relevant, 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. 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 the quality of 6 degree-of-freedom (6DOF) camera pose estimation through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art localization approaches. Based on our results, we draw conclusions about the difficulty of different conditions and propose promising avenues for future work. We will eventually make our two novel benchmarks publicly available.