# Localizing and Orienting Street Views Using Overhead Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00161 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00161/

## Key facts

- Cited by 94 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 94)

- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [Coming Down to Earth: Satellite-to-Street View Synthesis for Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06818/) (2021)
- [Sample4Geo: Hard Negative Sampling For Cross-View Geo-Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11851/) (2023)
- [Beyond Cross-view Image Retrieval: Highly Accurate Vehicle Localization Using Satellite Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04752/) (2022)
- [Cross-view Geo-localization via Learning Disentangled Geometric Layout Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04074/) (2022)
- [SUES-200: A Multi-height Multi-scene Cross-view Image Benchmark Across Drone and Satellite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10704/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Cross-View Geo-Localization Using a Correlation-Aware Homography Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16906/) (2023)
- [Visual Cross-View Metric Localization with Dense Uncertainty Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08519/) (2022)
- [Vision-Based UAV Self-Positioning in Low-Altitude Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09201/) (2022)
- [Boosting 3-DoF Ground-to-Satellite Camera Localization Accuracy via Geometry-Guided Cross-View Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08015/) (2023)
- [Accurate 3-DoF Camera Geo-Localization via Ground-to-Satellite Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14148/) (2022)
- [Geometry-Guided Street-View Panorama Synthesis from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01623/) (2021)
- [Cross-view image geo-localization with Panorama-BEV Co-Retrieval Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05475/) (2024)
- [Multiple-environment Self-adaptive Network for Aerial-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08381/) (2022)
- [Simple, Effective and General: A New Backbone for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01572/) (2023)
- [Convolutional Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05915/) (2023)
- [Cross-View Image Sequence Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14295/) (2022)
- [Unleashing Unlabeled Data: A Paradigm for Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14198/) (2024)
- [GeoDTR+: Toward generic cross-view geolocalization via geometric disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09624/) (2023)
- [CVLNet: Cross-View Semantic Correspondence Learning for Video-based Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03660/) (2022)
- [Learning Dense Flow Field for Highly-accurate Cross-view Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15556/) (2023)
- [Game4Loc: A UAV Geo-Localization Benchmark from Game Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16925/) (2024)
- [GAMa: Cross-view Video Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02431/) (2022)
- [Cross-View Geolocalization and Disaster Mapping with Street-View and VHR Satellite Imagery: A Case Study of Hurricane IAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06761/) (2024)
- [Can Vision-Language Models be a Good Guesser? Exploring VLMs for Times and Location Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06166/) (2023)
- [Cascaded Cross MLP-Mixer GANs for Cross-View Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10183/) (2021)
- [OmniCity: Omnipotent City Understanding with Multi-level and Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00928/) (2022)
- [Leveraging EfficientNet and Contrastive Learning for Accurate Global-scale Location Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07645/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Multimodal Opinion Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13135/) (2021)
- [Learning Cross-view Geo-localization Embeddings via Dynamic Weighted Decorrelation Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05296/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper we aim to determine the location and orientation of a ground-level query image by matching to a reference database of overhead (e.g. satellite) images. For this task we collect a new dataset with one million pairs of street view and overhead images sampled from eleven U.S. cities. We explore several deep CNN architectures for cross-domain matching -- Classification, Hybrid, Siamese, and Triplet networks. Classification and Hybrid architectures are accurate but slow since they allow only partial feature precomputation. We propose a new loss function which significantly improves the accuracy of Siamese and Triplet embedding networks while maintaining their applicability to large-scale retrieval tasks like image geolocalization. This image matching task is challenging not just because of the dramatic viewpoint difference between ground-level and overhead imagery but because the orientation (i.e. azimuth) of the street views is unknown making correspondence even more difficult. We examine several mechanisms to match in spite of this -- training for rotation invariance, sampling possible rotations at query time, and explicitly predicting relative rotation of ground and overhead images with our deep networks. It turns out that explicit orientation supervision also improves location prediction accuracy. Our best performing architectures are roughly 2.5 times as accurate as the commonly used Siamese network baseline.