EfficientVPR: Toward Efficient Visual Place Recognition via Scene-Aware Prompt Tuning and Adaptive Feature Enhancement

Visual place recognition (VPR) faces critical challenges in handling extreme environmental variations while meeting the computational constraints of practical applications. Current methods predominantly address these challenges by either scaling up model capacity or employing computationally intensive reranking stages, creating a significant efficiency bottleneck. To overcome this limitation, we propose EfficientVPR, a lightweight one-stage framework that achieves unprecedented speed-accuracy trade-offs through two key innovations: i) a scene-aware visual prompt tuning method which adapts pretrained features with less parameters while dynamically adjusting to sample-specific characteristics, and ii) an instance-dependent key local feature enhancement module that further reinforces discriminative regions. Comprehensive evaluations on Pitts250k, MSLS, Eynsham, AmsterTime and SVOX demonstrate that our method establishes a new SOTA for DINOv2-small models by outperforming all same-scale competitors, and delivers a 73× speedup with 60% lower-dimensional features while maintaining competitive (within 2.5% average R@1 gap) against the SOTA DINOv2-large-based two-stage method. The code is available in Supplementary Material.