UGNA-VPR: A Novel Training Paradigm for Visual Place Recognition Based on Uncertainty-Guided NeRF Augmentation

Visual place recognition (VPR) is crucial for robots to identify previously visited locations, playing an important role in autonomous navigation in both indoor and outdoor environments. However, most existing VPR datasets are limited to single-viewpoint scenarios, leading to reduced recognition accuracy, particularly in multi-directional driving or feature-sparse scenes. Moreover, obtaining additional data to mitigate these limitations is often expensive. This letter introduces a novel training paradigm to improve the performance of existing VPR networks by enhancing multi-view diversity within current datasets through uncertainty estimation and NeRF-based data augmentation. Specifically, we initially train NeRF using the existing VPR dataset. Then, our devised self-supervised uncertainty estimation network identifies places with high uncertainty. The poses of these uncertain places are input into NeRF to generate new synthetic observations for further training of VPR networks. Additionally, we propose an improved storage method for efficient organization of augmented and original training data. We conducted extensive experiments on three datasets and tested three different VPR backbone networks. The results demonstrate that our proposed training paradigm significantly improves VPR performance by fully utilizing existing data, outperforming other training approaches. We further validated the effectiveness of our approach on self-recorded indoor and outdoor datasets, consistently demonstrating superior results.