SNAP: Self-Supervised Neural Maps for Visual Positioning and Semantic Understanding
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Semantic 2D maps are commonly used by humans and machines for navigation purposes, whether it's walking or driving. However, these maps have limitations: they lack detail, often contain inaccuracies, and are difficult to create and maintain, especially in an automated fashion. Can we use raw imagery to automatically create better maps that can be easily interpreted by both humans and machines? We introduce SNAP, a deep network that learns rich neural 2D maps from ground-level and overhead images. We train our model to align neural maps estimated from different inputs, supervised only with camera poses over tens of millions of StreetView images. SNAP can resolve the location of challenging image queries beyond the reach of traditional methods, outperforming the state of the art in localization by a large margin. Moreover, our neural maps encode not only geometry and appearance but also high-level semantics, discovered without explicit supervision. This enables effective pre-training for data-efficient semantic scene understanding, with the potential to unlock cost-efficient creation of more detailed maps.
Key facts. Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 84 of its 123 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2023.
Builds on
84 of 123 references.
References · 84
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50 most cited of 84 All 84 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 14; 2025: 10; 2026: 12.
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- 2024Cross-view image geo-localization with Panorama-BEV Co-Retrieval Networkcited by 40
- 2025AerialMegaDepth: Learning Aerial-Ground Reconstruction and View Synthesiscited by 39
- 2025FG2: Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization by Fine-Grained Feature Matchingcited by 27
- 2024General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomycited by 23
- 2024MapLocNet: Coarse-to-Fine Feature Registration for Visual Re-Localization in Navigation Mapscited by 18
- 2024Adapting Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization to Areas without Fine Ground Truthcited by 14
- 2023U-BEV: Height-aware Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation and Neural Map-based Relocalizationcited by 13
- 2024Statewide Visual Geolocalization in the Wildcited by 12
- 2024LoD-Loc: Aerial Visual Localization using LoD 3D Map with Neural Wireframe Alignmentcited by 12
- 2023C-BEV: Contrastive Bird's Eye View Training for Cross-View Image Retrieval and 3-DoF Pose Estimationcited by 10
- 2025Scaling Image Geo-Localization to Continent Levelcited by 10
- 2025Agents Are All You Need for LLM Unlearningcited by 9
26 more
- 2025GeoDistill: Geometry-Guided Self-Distillation for Weakly Supervised Cross-View Localizationcited by 8
- 2025Loc2: Interpretable Cross-View Localization via Depth-Lifted Local Feature Matchingcited by 8
- 2025BevSplat: Resolving Height Ambiguity via Feature-Based Gaussian Primitives for Weakly-Supervised Cross-View Localizationcited by 7
- 2024Map It Anywhere (MIA): Empowering Bird's Eye View Mapping using Large-scale Public Datacited by 5
- 2024RING#: PR-by-PE Global Localization with Roto-translation Equivariant Gram Learningcited by 5
- 2025LoD-Loc v2: Aerial Visual Localization over Low Level-of-Detail City Models using Explicit Silhouette Alignmentcited by 5
- 2024When Cars meet Drones: Hyperbolic Federated Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Adverse Weathercited by 4
- 2024BEVLoc: Cross-View Localization and Matching via Birds-Eye-View Synthesiscited by 4
- 2025SGFormer: Satellite-Ground Fusion for 3D Semantic Scene Completioncited by 3
- 2024AGL-NET: Aerial-Ground Cross-Modal Global Localization with Varying Scalescited by 2
- 2024Maps from Motion (MfM): Generating 2D Semantic Maps from Sparse Multi-view Imagescited by 1
- 2024BEVPose: Unveiling Scene Semantics through Pose-Guided Multi-Modal BEV Alignmentcited by 0
- 2024SF-Loc: A Visual Mapping and Geo-Localization System based on Sparse Visual Structure Framescited by 0
- 2025Beyond Memorization: A Multi-Modal Ordinal Regression Benchmark to Expose Popularity Bias in Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026HOLO: Homography-Guided Pose Estimator Network for Fine-Grained Visual Localization on SD Mapscited by 0
- 2026LoD-Loc v3: Generalized Aerial Localization in Dense Cities using Instance Silhouette Alignmentcited by 0
- 2026Seeing Across Skies and Streets: Feedforward 3D Reconstruction from Satellite, Drone, and Ground Imagescited by 0
- 2026Fusing Satellite Imagery and Planimetric Maps for Cross-View Localizationcited by 0
- 2026Globally Localizing Lunar Rover in Pixels via Graph Alignmentcited by 0
- 2026Cross-View Yaw Estimation in Location Uncertainty with Line-Aligning Yaw Scoringcited by 0
- 2026More Than Where You Are: Learning Semantics, Structure, and Geometry from Cross-View Localizationcited by 0
- 2026Spotter: Efficient Urban Visual Localization via Geo-Referenced Facade Landmarks in GPS-Degraded Environmentscited by 0
- 2026OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localizationcited by 0
- 2026AutoCompass: Accurate Visual Localization on Public Maps by Learning from Weak Labelscited by 0
- 2026Multimodal Floorplan Encoding: Learning Dense Modality-Invariant Representationscited by 0
- 2026How to Reduce Localization Ambiguity? Geometry-Semantic Constrained BEV Representation Learning for Satellite-Ground Localizationcited by 0
- 2026How to Reduce Localization Ambiguity? Geometry-Semantic Constrained BEV Representation Learning for Satellite-Ground Localization30 Sep 2026
- 2026Multimodal Floorplan Encoding: Learning Dense Modality-Invariant Representations11 Sep 2026
- 2026AutoCompass: Accurate Visual Localization on Public Maps by Learning from Weak Labels2 Sep 2026
- 2026OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization26 Aug 2026
- 2026Spotter: Efficient Urban Visual Localization via Geo-Referenced Facade Landmarks in GPS-Degraded Environments24 Aug 2026
- 2026More Than Where You Are: Learning Semantics, Structure, and Geometry from Cross-View Localization14 Jul 2026
- 2026Cross-View Yaw Estimation in Location Uncertainty with Line-Aligning Yaw Scoring20 Jun 2026
- 2026Globally Localizing Lunar Rover in Pixels via Graph Alignment9 Jun 2026
- 2026Fusing Satellite Imagery and Planimetric Maps for Cross-View Localization8 Jun 2026
- 2026Seeing Across Skies and Streets: Feedforward 3D Reconstruction from Satellite, Drone, and Ground Images8 May 2026
- 2026LoD-Loc v3: Generalized Aerial Localization in Dense Cities using Instance Silhouette Alignment20 Mar 2026
- 2026HOLO: Homography-Guided Pose Estimator Network for Fine-Grained Visual Localization on SD Maps6 Jan 2026
26 more
- 2025Beyond Memorization: A Multi-Modal Ordinal Regression Benchmark to Expose Popularity Bias in Vision-Language Models24 Dec 2025
- 2025Scaling Image Geo-Localization to Continent Level30 Oct 2025
- 2025Loc2: Interpretable Cross-View Localization via Depth-Lifted Local Feature Matching11 Sep 2025
- 2025GeoDistill: Geometry-Guided Self-Distillation for Weakly Supervised Cross-View Localization15 Jul 2025
- 2025LoD-Loc v2: Aerial Visual Localization over Low Level-of-Detail City Models using Explicit Silhouette Alignment1 Jul 2025
- 2025AerialMegaDepth: Learning Aerial-Ground Reconstruction and View Synthesis17 Apr 2025
- 2025FG2: Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization by Fine-Grained Feature Matching24 Mar 2025
- 2025SGFormer: Satellite-Ground Fusion for 3D Semantic Scene Completion21 Mar 2025
- 2025BevSplat: Resolving Height Ambiguity via Feature-Based Gaussian Primitives for Weakly-Supervised Cross-View Localization13 Feb 2025
- 2025Agents Are All You Need for LLM Unlearning1 Feb 2025
- 2024SF-Loc: A Visual Mapping and Geo-Localization System based on Sparse Visual Structure Frames2 Dec 2024
- 2024Maps from Motion (MfM): Generating 2D Semantic Maps from Sparse Multi-view Images19 Nov 2024
- 2024BEVPose: Unveiling Scene Semantics through Pose-Guided Multi-Modal BEV Alignment28 Oct 2024
- 2024LoD-Loc: Aerial Visual Localization using LoD 3D Map with Neural Wireframe Alignment16 Oct 2024
- 2024BEVLoc: Cross-View Localization and Matching via Birds-Eye-View Synthesis8 Oct 2024
- 2024Statewide Visual Geolocalization in the Wild25 Sep 2024
- 2024RING#: PR-by-PE Global Localization with Roto-translation Equivariant Gram Learning30 Aug 2024
- 2024Cross-view image geo-localization with Panorama-BEV Co-Retrieval Network10 Aug 2024
- 2024Map It Anywhere (MIA): Empowering Bird's Eye View Mapping using Large-scale Public Data11 Jul 2024
- 2024MapLocNet: Coarse-to-Fine Feature Registration for Visual Re-Localization in Navigation Maps11 Jul 2024
- 2024Adapting Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization to Areas without Fine Ground Truth1 Jun 2024
- 2024General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy8 May 2024
- 2024AGL-NET: Aerial-Ground Cross-Modal Global Localization with Varying Scales4 Apr 2024
- 2024When Cars meet Drones: Hyperbolic Federated Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Adverse Weather20 Mar 2024
- 2023C-BEV: Contrastive Bird's Eye View Training for Cross-View Image Retrieval and 3-DoF Pose Estimation13 Dec 2023
- 2023U-BEV: Height-aware Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation and Neural Map-based Relocalization20 Oct 2023
- 2025Agents Are All You Need for LLM Unlearningcited by 9
- 2025Agents Are All You Need for LLM Unlearning1 Feb 2025
- 2024Cross-view image geo-localization with Panorama-BEV Co-Retrieval Networkcited by 40
- 2025AerialMegaDepth: Learning Aerial-Ground Reconstruction and View Synthesiscited by 39
- 2025FG2: Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization by Fine-Grained Feature Matchingcited by 27
- 2024General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomycited by 23
- 2024MapLocNet: Coarse-to-Fine Feature Registration for Visual Re-Localization in Navigation Mapscited by 18
- 2024Adapting Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization to Areas without Fine Ground Truthcited by 14
- 2023U-BEV: Height-aware Bird's-Eye-View Segmentation and Neural Map-based Relocalizationcited by 13
- 2024Statewide Visual Geolocalization in the Wildcited by 12
- 2024LoD-Loc: Aerial Visual Localization using LoD 3D Map with Neural Wireframe Alignmentcited by 12
- 2023C-BEV: Contrastive Bird's Eye View Training for Cross-View Image Retrieval and 3-DoF Pose Estimationcited by 10
- 2025Scaling Image Geo-Localization to Continent Levelcited by 10
- 2025GeoDistill: Geometry-Guided Self-Distillation for Weakly Supervised Cross-View Localizationcited by 8
12 most cited of 36 All 36 (JSON)
- 2026How to Reduce Localization Ambiguity? Geometry-Semantic Constrained BEV Representation Learning for Satellite-Ground Localization30 Sep 2026
- 2026Multimodal Floorplan Encoding: Learning Dense Modality-Invariant Representations11 Sep 2026
- 2026AutoCompass: Accurate Visual Localization on Public Maps by Learning from Weak Labels2 Sep 2026
- 2026OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization26 Aug 2026
- 2026Spotter: Efficient Urban Visual Localization via Geo-Referenced Facade Landmarks in GPS-Degraded Environments24 Aug 2026
- 2026More Than Where You Are: Learning Semantics, Structure, and Geometry from Cross-View Localization14 Jul 2026
- 2026Cross-View Yaw Estimation in Location Uncertainty with Line-Aligning Yaw Scoring20 Jun 2026
- 2026Globally Localizing Lunar Rover in Pixels via Graph Alignment9 Jun 2026
- 2026Fusing Satellite Imagery and Planimetric Maps for Cross-View Localization8 Jun 2026
- 2026Seeing Across Skies and Streets: Feedforward 3D Reconstruction from Satellite, Drone, and Ground Images8 May 2026
- 2026LoD-Loc v3: Generalized Aerial Localization in Dense Cities using Instance Silhouette Alignment20 Mar 2026
- 2026HOLO: Homography-Guided Pose Estimator Network for Fine-Grained Visual Localization on SD Maps6 Jan 2026
12 newest of 36 All 36 (JSON)