# Satellite Image Based Cross-view Localization for Autonomous Vehicle

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13506 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13506/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02565/) (2016)
- [DSAC - Differentiable RANSAC for Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05705/) (2016)
- [Geometric Loss Functions for Camera Pose Regression with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00390/) (2017)
- [Back to the Feature: Learning Robust Camera Localization from Pixels to Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09213/) (2021)
- [VIGOR: Cross-View Image Geo-localization beyond One-to-one Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12172/) (2020)
- [Lending Orientation to Neural Networks for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12351/) (2019)
- [Visual Camera Re-Localization from RGB and RGB-D Images Using DSAC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12324/) (2020)
- [BA-Net: Dense Bundle Adjustment Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04807/) (2018)
- [SoftTriple Loss: Deep Metric Learning Without Triplet Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05235/) (2019)
- [Why M Heads are Better than One: Training a Diverse Ensemble of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06314/) (2015)
- [Image-based localization using LSTMs for structured feature correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07890/) (2016)
- [Where am I looking at? Joint Location and Orientation Estimation by Cross-View Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03860/) (2020)
- [Coming Down to Earth: Satellite-to-Street View Synthesis for Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06818/) (2021)
- [Multi-Channel Attention Selection GAN with Cascaded Semantic Guidance for Cross-View Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06807/) (2019)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11045/) (2019)
- [Optimal Feature Transport for Cross-View Image Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05021/) (2019)
- [Beyond Cross-view Image Retrieval: Highly Accurate Vehicle Localization Using Satellite Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04752/) (2022)
- [Cross-View Image Synthesis using Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03396/) (2018)
- [VLocNet++: Deep Multitask Learning for Semantic Visual Localization and Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08366/) (2018)
- [Ford Multi-AV Seasonal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07969/) (2020)
- [On-the-Fly Adaptation of Regression Forests for Online Camera Relocalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.02779/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Street-to-Aerial View Image Geo-localization and Orientation Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11592/) (2020)
- [Visual-Inertial Monocular SLAM with Map Reuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05949/) (2016)
- [LS-Net: Learning to Solve Nonlinear Least Squares for Monocular Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02966/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Uncertainty-aware Vision-based Metric Cross-view Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12145/) (2022)
- [SliceMatch: Geometry-guided Aggregation for Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14651/) (2022)
- [Convolutional Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05915/) (2023)
- [Learning Dense Flow Field for Highly-accurate Cross-view Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15556/) (2023)
- [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)
- [U-BEV: Height-aware Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation and Neural Map-based Relocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13766/) (2023)
- [BevSplat: Resolving Height Ambiguity via Feature-Based Gaussian Primitives for Weakly-Supervised Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09080/) (2025)
- [PIDLoc: Cross-View Pose Optimization Network Inspired by PID Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02388/) (2025)
- [AGL-NET: Aerial-Ground Cross-Modal Global Localization with Varying Scales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03187/) (2024)
- [Homography Guided Temporal Fusion for Road Line and Marking Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07626/) (2024)
- [Object-level Cross-view Geo-localization with Location Enhancement and Multi-Head Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17911/) (2025)
- [Cross-View Localization via Redundant Sliced Observations and A-Contrario Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05369/) (2025)
- [RHO: Robust Holistic OSM-Based Metric Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27758/) (2026)
- [TransLocNet: Cross-Modal Attention for Aerial-Ground Vehicle Localization with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10419/) (2025)
- [VIRD: View-Invariant Representation through Dual-Axis Transformation for Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12918/) (2026)
- [GOLD-BEV: GrOund and aeriaL Data for Dense Semantic BEV Mapping of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19411/) (2026)
- [Globally Localizing Lunar Rover in Pixels via Graph Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10602/) (2026)
- [The Coastline as a Structural Constraint: Harnessing Scene Geometry for Autonomous Surface Vessel Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21276/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing spatial localization techniques for autonomous vehicles mostly use a pre-built 3D-HD map, often constructed using a survey-grade 3D mapping vehicle, which is not only expensive but also laborious. This paper shows that by using an off-the-shelf high-definition satellite image as a ready-to-use map, we are able to achieve cross-view vehicle localization up to a satisfactory accuracy, providing a cheaper and more practical way for localization. While the utilization of satellite imagery for cross-view localization is an established concept, the conventional methodology focuses primarily on image retrieval. This paper introduces a novel approach to cross-view localization that departs from the conventional image retrieval method. Specifically, our method develops (1) a Geometric-align Feature Extractor (GaFE) that leverages measured 3D points to bridge the geometric gap between ground and overhead views, (2) a Pose Aware Branch (PAB) adopting a triplet loss to encourage pose-aware feature extraction, and (3) a Recursive Pose Refine Branch (RPRB) using the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm to align the initial pose towards the true vehicle pose iteratively. Our method is validated on KITTI and Ford Multi-AV Seasonal datasets as ground view and Google Maps as the satellite view. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method in cross-view localization with median spatial and angular errors within 1 meter and 1^circ, respectively.