A Quantum-Inspired Framework in Leader-Servant Mode for Large-Scale Multi-Modal Place Recognition

Multi-modal place recognition aims to grasp diversified information implied in different modalities to bring vitality to place recognition tasks. The key challenge is rooted in the representation gap in modalities, the feature fusion method, and their relationships. The majority of existing methods are based on uni-modal, leaving these challenges unsolved effectively. To address the problems, encouraged by double-split experiments in physics and cooperation modes, in this paper, we introduce a leader-servant multi-modal framework inspired by quantum theory for large-scale place recognition. Two key modules are designed, a quantum representation module and an interference-aware fusion module. The former is designed for multi-modal data to capture their diversity and bridge the gap, while the latter is proposed to effectively fuse the multi-modal feature with the guidance of the quantum theory. Besides, we propose a leader-servant training strategy for stable training, where three cases are considered with the multi-modal loss as the leader to preserve overall characteristics and other uni-modal losses as the servants to lighten the modality influence of the leader. Furthermore, The framework is compatible with uni-modal place recognition. At last, The experiments on three datasets witness the efficiency, generalization, and robustness of the proposed method in contrast to the other existing methods.