DAC-MACE: Context-Conditioned Expert Routing for Compact Scene Coordinate Regression in Camera Relocalization

arXiv:2611.10263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A camera becomes an absolute pose sensor when its images can be relocalized against a prebuilt map of the scene. On mobile robots and augmented-reality devices, that map must be small and quick to build. Scene coordinate regression (SCR) stores the scene in a compact network that predicts a 3D coordinate for every pixel, and mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants extend its capacity to larger outdoor scenes. In existing MoE-based SCR, however, the router assigns each pixel to an expert from the same local descriptor that the experts regress from, so repeated facades and windows at different locations receive similar routing inputs. We present DAC-MACE, which conditions soft expert routing on recalibrated and contextualized features. A residual context adapter (RCA) reweights the channels and locations of frozen encoder features, a global context encoder (GCE) mixes them with multi-scale self-attention, and an image-level pooled descriptor is added to the router input. A dual-threshold RANSAC--Levenberg--Marquardt estimator recovers the pose. On Cambridge Landmarks, DAC-MACE attains a mean per-scene median translation error of 13.0 cm over three seeds, the lowest among the RGB-only SCR methods compared (GLACE 13.6 cm, MACE 14.4 cm), and reduces the error on the largest scene from 24 to 19 cm relative to MACE. In a cumulative study, the MoE head, GCE, RCA, and the dual-threshold estimator lower the mean error from 17.0 cm to 14.4, 14.0, 13.6, and 13.0 cm. On 7-Scenes, adding GCE to a single ACE head raises Recall@(5 cm, 5$^\circ$) from 86.56% to 87.60%.