View article

Absolute pose regressor (APR) networks are trained to estimate the pose of the camera given a captured image. They compute latent image representations from which the camera position and orientation are regressed. APRs provide a different tradeoff between localization accuracy, runtime, and memory, compared to structure-based localization schemes that provide state-of-the-art accuracy. In this work, we introduce Camera Pose Auto-Encoders (PAEs), multilayer perceptrons that are trained via a Teacher-Student approach to encode camera poses using APRs as their teachers. We show that the resulting latent pose representations can closely reproduce APR performance and demonstrate their effectiveness for related tasks. Specifically, we propose a light-weight test-time optimization in which the closest train poses are encoded and used to refine camera position estimation. This procedure achieves a new …