16 papers
Breaking Déjà Vu: Independent Auditing of Visual Place Recognition through Vision-Language Reasoning
Sania Waheed, Michael Milford, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn +1
The paper proposes an independent auditing framework that uses vision‑language models to verify visual place‑recognition matches, improving recall and reducing false acceptances wi…
On Motion Blur and Deblurring in Visual Place Recognition
Timur Ismagilov, Bruno Ferrarini, Michael Milford +3
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) in mobile robotics enables robots to localize themselves by recognizing previously visited locations using visual data. While the reliability of VPR…
VLM-Guided Visual Place Recognition for Planet-Scale Geo-Localization
Sania Waheed, Na Min An, Michael Milford +2
Geo-localization from a single image at planet scale (essentially an advanced or extreme version of the kidnapped robot problem) is a fundamental and challenging task in applicatio…
Image-based Geo-localization for Robotics: Are Black-box Vision-Language Models there yet?
Sania Waheed, Bruno Ferrarini, Michael Milford +2
The advances in Vision-Language models (VLMs) offer exciting opportunities for robotic applications involving image geo-localization - the problem of identifying the geo-coordinate…
One Channel to Rule Them All: Rethinking Input Representation for Visual Place Recognition
Timur Ismagilov, Shakaiba Majeed, Michael Milford +3
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is fundamental to long-term robot localization and SLAM, yet current systems overwhelmingly rely on RGB input, implicitly assuming color is necessary…
Back to the Communities: A Mixed-Methods and Community-Driven Evaluation of Cultural Sensitivity in Text-to-Image Models
Sarah Kiden, Oriane Peter, Gisela Reyes-Cruz +11
Evidence shows that text-to-image (T2I) models disproportionately reflect Western cultural norms, amplifying misrepresentation and harms to minority groups. However, evaluating cul…