MMS-VPR: Multimodal Street-Level Visual Place Recognition Dataset and Benchmark

Abstract

Existing visual place recognition (VPR) datasets predominantly rely on vehicle-mounted imagery, offer limited multimodal diversity, and underrepresent dense pedestrian street scenes, particularly in non-Western urban contexts. We introduce MMS-VPR, a large-scale multimodal dataset for street-level place recognition in pedestrian-only environments. MMS-VPR comprises 110,529 images and 2,527 video clips across 208 locations in a ~70,800 $m^2$ open-air commercial district in Chengdu, China. Field data were collected in 2024, while social media data span seven years (2019-2025), providing both fine-grained temporal granularity and long-term temporal coverage. Each location features comprehensive day-night coverage, multiple viewing angles, and multimodal annotations including GPS coordinates, timestamps, and semantic textual metadata. We further release MMS-VPRlib, a unified benchmarking platform that consolidates commonly used VPR datasets and state-of-the-art methods under a standardized, reproducible pipeline. MMS-VPRlib provides modular components for data pre-processing, multimodal modeling (CNN/RNN/Transformer), signal enhancement, alignment, fusion, and performance evaluation. This platform moves beyond traditional image-only paradigms, enabling systematic exploitation of complementary visual, video, and textual modalities. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yiwei-Ou/MMS-VPR and the benchmark at https://github.com/yiasun/MMS-VPRlib.