  Localizing an image wrt. a 3D scene model represents a core task for many
computer vision applications. An increasing number of real-world applications
of visual localization on mobile devices, e.g., Augmented Reality or autonomous
robots such as drones or self-driving cars, demand localization approaches to
minimize storage and bandwidth requirements. Compressing the 3D models used for
localization thus becomes a practical necessity. In this work, we introduce a
new hybrid compression algorithm that uses a given memory limit in a more
effective way. Rather than treating all 3D points equally, it represents a
small set of points with full appearance information and an additional, larger
set of points with compressed information. This enables our approach to obtain
a more complete scene representation without increasing the memory
requirements, leading to a superior performance compared to previous
compression schemes. As part of our contribution, we show how to handle
ambiguous matches arising from point compression during RANSAC. Besides
outperforming previous compression techniques in terms of pose accuracy under
the same memory constraints, our compression scheme itself is also more
efficient. Furthermore, the localization rates and accuracy obtained with our
approach are comparable to state-of-the-art feature-based methods, while using
a small fraction of the memory.
