# Optimal Feature Transport for Cross-View Image Geo-Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05021/

## Key facts

- Cited by 90 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 90)

- [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)
- [OrienterNet: Visual Localization in 2D Public Maps with Neural Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02009/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [SliceMatch: Geometry-guided Aggregation for Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14651/) (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)
- [Sat2Density: Faithful Density Learning from Satellite-Ground Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14672/) (2023)
- [Towards a Collective Agenda on AI for Earth Science Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05107/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ConGeo: Robust Cross-view Geo-localization across Ground View Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13965/) (2024)
- [Satellite Image Based Cross-view Localization for Autonomous Vehicle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13506/) (2022)
- [Geo-Localization via Ground-to-Satellite Cross-View Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10878/) (2022)
- [Learning Cross-view Geo-localization Embeddings via Dynamic Weighted Decorrelation Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05296/) (2022)
- [Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13610/) (2024)
- [Multi-Level Embedding and Alignment Network with Consistency and Invariance Learning for Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14819/) (2024)
- [View Consistent Purification for Accurate Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08110/) (2023)
- [Cross-view geo-localization: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09722/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper addresses the problem of cross-view image geo-localization, where the geographic location of a ground-level street-view query image is estimated by matching it against a large scale aerial map (e.g., a high-resolution satellite image). State-of-the-art deep-learning based methods tackle this problem as deep metric learning which aims to learn global feature representations of the scene seen by the two different views. Despite promising results are obtained by such deep metric learning methods, they, however, fail to exploit a crucial cue relevant for localization, namely, the spatial layout of local features. Moreover, little attention is paid to the obvious domain gap (between aerial view and ground view) in the context of cross-view localization. This paper proposes a novel Cross-View Feature Transport (CVFT) technique to explicitly establish cross-view domain transfer that facilitates feature alignment between ground and aerial images. Specifically, we implement the CVFT as network layers, which transports features from one domain to the other, leading to more meaningful feature similarity comparison. Our model is differentiable and can be learned end-to-end. Experiments on large-scale datasets have demonstrated that our method has remarkably boosted the state-of-the-art cross-view localization performance, e.g., on the CVUSA dataset, with significant improvements for top-1 recall from 40.79% to 61.43%, and for top-10 from 76.36% to 90.49%. We expect the key insight of the paper (i.e., explicitly handling domain difference via domain transport) will prove to be useful for other similar problems in computer vision as well.