Real-Time Loop Closure Detection in Visual SLAM via NetVLAD and Faiss

Abstract

Loop closure detection (LCD) is a core component of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM): it identifies revisited places and enables pose-graph constraints that correct accumulated drift. Classic bag-of-words approaches such as DBoW are efficient but often degrade under appearance change and perceptual aliasing. In parallel, deep learning-based visual place recognition (VPR) descriptors (e.g., NetVLAD and Transformer-based models) offer stronger robustness, but their computational cost is often viewed as a barrier to real-time SLAM. In this paper, we empirically evaluate NetVLAD as an LCD module and compare it against DBoW on the KITTI dataset. We introduce a Fine-Grained Top-K precision-recall curve that better reflects LCD settings where a query may have zero or multiple valid matches. With Faiss-accelerated nearestneighbor search, NetVLAD achieves real-time query speed while improving accuracy and robustness over DBoW, making it a practical drop-in alternative for LCD in SLAM.