  Visual place recognition is challenging because there are so many factors
that can cause the appearance of a place to change, from day-night cycles to
seasonal change to atmospheric conditions. In recent years a large range of
approaches have been developed to address this challenge including deep-learnt
image descriptors, domain translation, and sequential filtering, all with
shortcomings including generality and velocity-sensitivity. In this paper we
propose a novel descriptor derived from tracking changes in any learned global
descriptor over time, dubbed Delta Descriptors. Delta Descriptors mitigate the
offsets induced in the original descriptor matching space in an unsupervised
manner by considering temporal differences across places observed along a
route. Like all other approaches, Delta Descriptors have a shortcoming -
volatility on a frame to frame basis - which can be overcome by combining them
with sequential filtering methods. Using two benchmark datasets, we first
demonstrate the high performance of Delta Descriptors in isolation, before
showing new state-of-the-art performance when combined with sequence-based
matching. We also present results demonstrating the approach working with four
different underlying descriptor types, and two other beneficial properties of
Delta Descriptors in comparison to existing techniques: their increased
inherent robustness to variations in camera motion and a reduced rate of
performance degradation as dimensional reduction is applied. Source code is
made available at https://github.com/oravus/DeltaDescriptors.
