AdaptVPR: Route-Aware Hard Positive Generation for Robust Visual Place Recognition
AdaptVPR generates route-aware synthetic hard positives for visual place recognition, releasing the 160K-image AdaptCities dataset with R@1 gains up to 9.2% under domain shift.
AdaptVPR is a generative augmentation framework that creates same-place hard positives under illumination, weather, seasonal, and dynamic-occlusion shifts for robust visual place recognition training. A vision-language model parses scene attributes and estimates editability, while a rule-based scheduler routes generation through global appearance, local occlusion, or dual perturbation routes with geometric-consistency verification. The resulting AdaptCities dataset contains 160K verified synthetic hard positives, and experiments show R@1 gains up to 9.2% across VPR baselines and backbones. Code and data are publicly released on GitHub.