# Visual Cross-View Metric Localization with Dense Uncertainty Estimates

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.08519 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08519/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [VIGOR: Cross-View Image Geo-localization beyond One-to-one Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12172/) (2020)
- [Wide-Area Image Geolocalization with Aerial Reference Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03743/) (2015)
- [Lending Orientation to Neural Networks for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12351/) (2019)
- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11045/) (2019)
- [Localizing and Orienting Street Views Using Overhead Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00161/) (2016)
- [Optimal Feature Transport for Cross-View Image Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05021/) (2019)
- [Predicting Ground-Level Scene Layout from Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02709/) (2016)
- [Beyond Cross-view Image Retrieval: Highly Accurate Vehicle Localization Using Satellite Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04752/) (2022)
- [Cross-View Image Matching for Geo-localization in Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07815/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Street-to-Aerial View Image Geo-localization and Orientation Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11592/) (2020)
- [Real-time Kinematic Ground Truth for the Oxford RobotCar Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10152/) (2020)
- [Learning to Localize Using a LiDAR Intensity Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10902/) (2020)
- [Image-Based Geo-Localization Using Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00159/) (2019)
- [RSL-Net: Localising in Satellite Images From a Radar on the Ground](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03233/) (2020)
- [Learning to Localize Through Compressed Binary Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10942/) (2020)
- [Learning Matchable Image Transformations for Long-term Metric Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01080/) (2019)
- [RaLL: End-to-end Radar Localization on Lidar Map Using Differentiable Measurement Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07061/) (2020)
- [Metric Localization using Google Street View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.04287/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [OrienterNet: Visual Localization in 2D Public Maps with Neural Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02009/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Cross-View Geo-Localization Using a Correlation-Aware Homography Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16906/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Boosting 3-DoF Ground-to-Satellite Camera Localization Accuracy via Geometry-Guided Cross-View Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08015/) (2023)
- [SNAP: Self-Supervised Neural Maps for Visual Positioning and Semantic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05407/) (2023)
- [Convolutional Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05915/) (2023)
- [ConGeo: Robust Cross-view Geo-localization across Ground View Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13965/) (2024)
- [FG2: Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization by Fine-Grained Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18725/) (2025)
- [Learning Dense Flow Field for Highly-accurate Cross-view Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15556/) (2023)
- [F3Loc: Fusion and Filtering for Floorplan Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03370/) (2024)
- [MapLocNet: Coarse-to-Fine Feature Registration for Visual Re-Localization in Navigation Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08561/) (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)
- [Weakly-supervised Camera Localization by Ground-to-satellite Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06471/) (2024)
- [Adapting Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization to Areas without Fine Ground Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00474/) (2024)
- [U-BEV: Height-aware Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation and Neural Map-based Relocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13766/) (2023)
- [LoD-Loc: Aerial Visual Localization using LoD 3D Map with Neural Wireframe Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12269/) (2024)
- [Statewide Visual Geolocalization in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16763/) (2024)
- [CrossLoc3D: Aerial-Ground Cross-Source 3D Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17778/) (2023)
- [C-BEV: Contrastive Bird's Eye View Training for Cross-View Image Retrieval and 3-DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08060/) (2023)
- [GAReT: Cross-view Video Geolocalization with Adapters and Auto-Regressive Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02840/) (2024)
- [BevSplat: Resolving Height Ambiguity via Feature-Based Gaussian Primitives for Weakly-Supervised Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09080/) (2025)
- [GeoDistill: Geometry-Guided Self-Distillation for Weakly Supervised Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10935/) (2025)
- [Loc2: Interpretable Cross-View Localization via Depth-Lifted Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09792/) (2025)
- [Geometry-guided Cross-view Diffusion for One-to-many Cross-view Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03315/) (2024)
- [LoD-Loc v2: Aerial Visual Localization over Low Level-of-Detail City Models using Explicit Silhouette Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00659/) (2025)
- [Learning to be Smooth: An End-to-End Differentiable Particle Smoother](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10546/) (2025)
- [PIDLoc: Cross-View Pose Optimization Network Inspired by PID Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02388/) (2025)
- [A Unified Hierarchical Framework for Fine-grained Cross-view Geo-localization over Large-scale Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07622/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work addresses visual cross-view metric localization for outdoor robotics. Given a ground-level color image and a satellite patch that contains the local surroundings, the task is to identify the location of the ground camera within the satellite patch. Related work addressed this task for range-sensors (LiDAR, Radar), but for vision, only as a secondary regression step after an initial cross-view image retrieval step. Since the local satellite patch could also be retrieved through any rough localization prior (e.g. from GPS/GNSS, temporal filtering), we drop the image retrieval objective and focus on the metric localization only. We devise a novel network architecture with denser satellite descriptors, similarity matching at the bottleneck (rather than at the output as in image retrieval), and a dense spatial distribution as output to capture multi-modal localization ambiguities. We compare against a state-of-the-art regression baseline that uses global image descriptors. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the recently proposed VIGOR and the Oxford RobotCar datasets validate our design. The produced probabilities are correlated with localization accuracy, and can even be used to roughly estimate the ground camera's heading when its orientation is unknown. Overall, our method reduces the median metric localization error by 51%, 37%, and 28% compared to the state-of-the-art when generalizing respectively in the same area, across areas, and across time.