Author: Antonino Furnari;

With the increasing interest in augmented and virtual reality, visual localization is acquiring a key role in many downstream applications requiring a real-time estimate of the user location only from visual streams. In this paper, we propose an optimized hierarchical localization pipeline by specifically tackling cultural heritage sites with specific applications in museums. Specifically, we propose to enhance the Structure from Motion (SfM) pipeline for constructing the sparse 3D point cloud by a-priori filtering blurred and near-duplicated images. We also study an improved inference pipeline that merges similarity-based localization with geometric pose estimation to effectively mitigate the effect of strong outliers. We show that the proposed optimized pipeline obtains the lowest localization error on the challenging Bellomo dataset [11]. Our proposed approach keeps both build and inference times bounded, in turn enabling the deployment of this pipeline in real-world scenarios.