CoHAtNet: An integrated convolutional-transformer architecture with hybrid self-attention for end-to-end camera localization

Camera localization refers to the process of automatically determining the position and orientation of a camera within its 3D environment from the images it captures. Traditional camera localization methods often rely on Convolutional Neural Networks, which are effective at extracting local visual features but struggle to capture long-range dependencies critical for accurate localization. In contrast, Transformer-based approaches model global contextual relationships appropriately, although they often lack precision in fine-grained spatial representations. To bridge this gap, we introduce CoHAtNet, a novel Convolutional Hybrid-Attention Network that tightly integrates convolutional and self-attention mechanisms.

Unlike previous hybrid models that stack convolutional and attention layers separately, CoHAtNet embeds local features extracted via Mobile Inverted Bottleneck Convolution blocks directly into the Value component of the self-attention mechanism of Transformers. This yields a hybrid self-attention block capable of dynamically capturing both local spatial detail and global semantic context within a single attention layer. Additionally, CoHAtNet enables modality-level fusion by processing RGB and depth data jointly in a unified pipeline, allowing the model to leverage complementary appearance and geometric cues throughout.

Extensive evaluations have been conducted on two widely-used camera localization datasets: 7-Scenes (RGB-D) and Cambridge Landmarks (RGB). Experimental results show that CoHAtNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in both translation and orientation accuracy. These results highlight the effectiveness of our hybrid design in challenging indoor and outdoor environments. This makes CoHAtNet a strong candidate for end-to-end camera localization tasks.