  Visual localization is the task of accurate camera pose estimation in a known
scene. It is a key problem in computer vision and robotics, with applications
including self-driving cars, Structure-from-Motion, SLAM, and Mixed Reality.
Traditionally, the localization problem has been tackled using 3D geometry.
Recently, end-to-end approaches based on convolutional neural networks have
become popular. These methods learn to directly regress the camera pose from an
input image. However, they do not achieve the same level of pose accuracy as 3D
structure-based methods. To understand this behavior, we develop a theoretical
model for camera pose regression. We use our model to predict failure cases for
pose regression techniques and verify our predictions through experiments. We
furthermore use our model to show that pose regression is more closely related
to pose approximation via image retrieval than to accurate pose estimation via
3D structure. A key result is that current approaches do not consistently
outperform a handcrafted image retrieval baseline. This clearly shows that
additional research is needed before pose regression algorithms are ready to
compete with structure-based methods.
