# Convolutional Cross-View Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05915 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05915/

## Key facts

- Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Learning with a Wasserstein Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05439/) (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)
- [Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05519/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Each Part Matters: Local Patterns Facilitate Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11646/) (2020)
- [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 Synthesis using Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03396/) (2018)
- [Uncertainty-aware Vision-based Metric Cross-view Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12145/) (2022)
- [Visual Cross-View Metric Localization with Dense Uncertainty Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08519/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Fine-Grained Cross-View Geo-Localization Using a Correlation-Aware Homography Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16906/) (2023)
- [FG2: Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization by Fine-Grained Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18725/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Statewide Visual Geolocalization in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16763/) (2024)
- [GAReT: Cross-view Video Geolocalization with Adapters and Auto-Regressive Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02840/) (2024)
- [Seeing through Satellite Images at Street Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17001/) (2025)
- [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)
- [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)
- [SA-Occ: Satellite-Assisted 3D Occupancy Prediction in Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16399/) (2025)
- [ViewBridge:Revisiting Cross-View Localization from Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10716/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Global Geo-alignment for Precision Learned Autonomous Vehicle Localization using Aerial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13896/) (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)
- [CLNet: Cross-View Correspondence Makes a Stronger Geo-Localizationer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14560/) (2025)
- [BEV-Patch-PF: Particle Filtering with BEV-Aerial Feature Matching for Off-Road Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15111/) (2025)
- [HOLO: Homography-Guided Pose Estimator Network for Fine-Grained Visual Localization on SD Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02730/) (2026)
- [Cross-view Domain Generalization via Geometric Consistency for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14525/) (2026)
- [VIRD: View-Invariant Representation through Dual-Axis Transformation for Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12918/) (2026)
- [GeoFlow: Real-Time Fine-Grained Cross-View Geolocalization via Iterative Flow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21943/) (2026)
- [TACO: Trajectory Aligning Cross-view Optimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03315/) (2026)
- [Seeing Across Skies and Streets: Feedforward 3D Reconstruction from Satellite, Drone, and Ground Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07978/) (2026)
- [Empowering Feed-Forward Reconstruction Models with Metric Scale via Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08205/) (2026)
- [Fusing Satellite Imagery and Planimetric Maps for Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10166/) (2026)
- [Cross-View Yaw Estimation in Location Uncertainty with Line-Aligning Yaw Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22094/) (2026)
- [More Than Where You Are: Learning Semantics, Structure, and Geometry from Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12429/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel end-to-end method for cross-view pose estimation. Given a ground-level query image and an aerial image that covers the query's local neighborhood, the 3 Degrees-of-Freedom camera pose of the query is estimated by matching its image descriptor to descriptors of local regions within the aerial image. The orientation-aware descriptors are obtained by using a translationally equivariant convolutional ground image encoder and contrastive learning. The Localization Decoder produces a dense probability distribution in a coarse-to-fine manner with a novel Localization Matching Upsampling module. A smaller Orientation Decoder produces a vector field to condition the orientation estimate on the localization. Our method is validated on the VIGOR and KITTI datasets, where it surpasses the state-of-the-art baseline by 72% and 36% in median localization error for comparable orientation estimation accuracy. The predicted probability distribution can represent localization ambiguity, and enables rejecting possible erroneous predictions. Without re-training, the model can infer on ground images with different field of views and utilize orientation priors if available. On the Oxford RobotCar dataset, our method can reliably estimate the ego-vehicle's pose over time, achieving a median localization error under 1 meter and a median orientation error of around 1 degree at 14 FPS.