GeoUniPR: A Geometry-Consistent Unified Framework for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Researchers propose GeoUniPR, a geometry-consistent unified framework for cross-modal place recognition that projects LiDAR point clouds into camera perspective to create depth image views, achieving state-of-the-art performance on KITTI and KITTI-360 datasets. The framework uses two ViT-based encoders with identical architectures and introduces Spatially-Consistent InfoNCE to suppress distance-induced false negatives, enabling strong cross-dataset generalization without auxiliary alignment modules or full backbone fine-tuning.

arXiv:2608.11263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-modal place recognition CMPR aims to identify the same location across heterogeneous sensing modalities, such as vision and LiDAR. Existing methods commonly bridge the modality gap using complex alignment modules, multi-stage training, or full fine-tuning of pretrained backbones. In this work, we revisit CMPR from the perspective of geometric consistency and propose GeoUniPR, a unified and concise geometry-consistent framework. GeoUniPR reduces cross-modal discrepancy at the representation level by projecting LiDAR point clouds into the camera perspective to construct Geometry-Consistent depth image views DIV , which establish direct RGB-LiDAR correspondence. We further augment DIV with native LiDAR cues, including intensity and surface-normal information, yielding a multi-channel geometric representation that improves structural consistency. Based on this representation, GeoUniPR learns a unified embedding space using two modality-specific ViT-based encoders with identical architectures, trained through parameter-efficient adaptation without auxiliary alignment modules, multi-stage training, or full backbone fine-tuning. In addition, we introduce Spatially-Consistent InfoNCE SC-InfoNCE , a CMPR-specific contrastive objective that suppresses distance-induced false negatives under spatial continuity. Extensive experiments on KITTI and KITTI-360 demonstrate that GeoUniPR achieves state-of-the-art SOTA performance in both same-modal and cross-modal place recognition, with strong cross-dataset generalization.