MMS-VPR: A Fine-Grained Multimodal Street-Level Visual Place Recognition Dataset and Evaluation Benchmark for Dense Pedestrian Environments

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 present MMS-VPR, a challenging fine-grained multimodal benchmark for pedestrian-level place recognition in dense urban environments. MMS-VPR comprises 110,529 images and 2,527 video clips across 208 fine-grained location classes within a $\sim$70,800 m$^2$ urban district in Chengdu, China, with adjacent classes separated by as little as 10-20 m. Unlike large-area VPR datasets, MMS-VPR elevates difficulty through visual ambiguity: repetitive storefronts, dense occlusion, and rapid viewpoint changes. Field data were collected in 2024 following a systematic multi-direction, dual-perspective protocol; social media imagery spans seven years (2019-2025), providing long-term appearance change across 31,726 geolocated photographs. Each location features day-night coverage, multiple viewing angles, and multimodal annotations including GPS coordinates, timestamps, semantic text, and an explicit spatial graph with space syntax enrichments. We release MMS-VPRlib, a unified benchmarking platform consolidating 22 baselines spanning shallow ML, CNN, Transformer, graph neural network (GNN), and multimodal architectures under a standardized, reproducible pipeline. Controlled modality ablations show that video temporal features are the most powerful single modality (+15.8% accuracy over image-only), semantic text provides superior coarse retrieval (R@5 = 0.988 alone), and full multimodal fusion achieves 0.981 accuracy, a +19.2% gain over image-only, while graph-structured modeling provides additional signal in fine-grained structural subsets. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yiwei-Ou/MMS-VPR and the benchmark at https://github.com/yiasun/MMS-VPRlib.