We address the problem of map sparsification for long-term visual
localization. For map sparsification, a commonly employed assumption is that
the pre-build map and the later captured localization query are consistent.
However, this assumption can be easily violated in the dynamic world.
Additionally, the map size grows as new data accumulate through time, causing
large data overhead in the long term. In this paper, we aim to overcome the
environmental changes and reduce the map size at the same time by selecting
points that are valuable to future localization. Inspired by the recent
progress in Graph Neural Network(GNN), we propose the first work that models
SfM maps as heterogeneous graphs and predicts 3D point importance scores with a
GNN, which enables us to directly exploit the rich information in the SfM map
graph. Two novel supervisions are proposed: 1) a data-fitting term for
selecting valuable points to future localization based on training queries; 2)
a K-Cover term for selecting sparse points with full map coverage. The
experiments show that our method selected map points on stable and widely
visible structures and outperformed baselines in localization performance.

本文介绍了一种使用图神经网络模型建模三维稠密地图为异构图并预测三维点重要性得分的方法，以选取具有未来重定位价值和稀疏地图覆盖的点。该方法在自适应环境中提取出稳定和广泛可见的地图点，并在定位性能方面优于基线模型。