# Boosting 3-DoF Ground-to-Satellite Camera Localization Accuracy via Geometry-Guided Cross-View Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08015 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08015/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Cross-view Transformers for real-time Map-view Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02833/) (2022)
- [Geometric Loss Functions for Camera Pose Regression with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00390/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Predicting Semantic Map Representations from Images using Pyramid Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13402/) (2020)
- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [PersFormer: 3D Lane Detection via Perspective Transformer and the OpenLane Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11089/) (2022)
- [Where am I looking at? Joint Location and Orientation Estimation by Cross-View Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03860/) (2020)
- [FS-Net: Fast Shape-based Network for Category-Level 6D Object Pose Estimation with Decoupled Rotation Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07054/) (2021)
- [Translating Images into Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00966/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [SliceMatch: Geometry-guided Aggregation for Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14651/) (2022)
- [Geometry-Guided Street-View Panorama Synthesis from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01623/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Street-to-Aerial View Image Geo-localization and Orientation Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11592/) (2020)
- [Semantic Cross-View Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00098/) (2015)
- [Cross-view image synthesis using geometry-guided conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05469/) (2018)
- [Sat2Vid: Street-view Panoramic Video Synthesis from a Single Satellite Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06628/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Fine-Grained Cross-View Geo-Localization Using a Correlation-Aware Homography Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16906/) (2023)
- [Cross-view image geo-localization with Panorama-BEV Co-Retrieval Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05475/) (2024)
- [FG2: Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization by Fine-Grained Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18725/) (2025)
- [General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04812/) (2024)
- [SG-BEV: Satellite-Guided BEV Fusion for Cross-View Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02638/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Geospecific View Generation -- Geometry-Context Aware High-resolution Ground View Inference from Satellite Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08061/) (2024)
- [Statewide Visual Geolocalization in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16763/) (2024)
- [Leveraging BEV Paradigm for Ground-to-Aerial Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01812/) (2024)
- [Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Using Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02408/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [EarthLoc: Astronaut Photography Localization by Indexing Earth from Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06758/) (2024)
- [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)
- [GeoExplorer: Active Geo-localization with Curiosity-Driven Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00152/) (2025)
- [Last-Meter Precision Navigation for UAVs: A Diffusion-Refined Aerial Visual Servoing Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04352/) (2026)
- [Spatiotemporal Contrastive Learning for Cross-View Video Localization in Unstructured Off-road Terrains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05250/) (2025)
- [CVD-SfM: A Cross-View Deep Front-end Structure-from-Motion System for Sparse Localization in Multi-Altitude Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01936/) (2025)
- [ViewBridge:Revisiting Cross-View Localization from Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10716/) (2025)
- [Maps from Motion (MfM): Generating 2D Semantic Maps from Sparse Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12620/) (2024)
- [Cross-View Localization via Redundant Sliced Observations and A-Contrario Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05369/) (2025)
- [Beyond Matching to Tiles: Bridging Unaligned Aerial and Satellite Views for Vision-Only UAV Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22153/) (2026)
- [RHO: Robust Holistic OSM-Based Metric Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27758/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image retrieval-based cross-view localization methods often lead to very coarse camera pose estimation, due to the limited sampling density of the database satellite images. In this paper, we propose a method to increase the accuracy of a ground camera's location and orientation by estimating the relative rotation and translation between the ground-level image and its matched/retrieved satellite image. Our approach designs a geometry-guided cross-view transformer that combines the benefits of conventional geometry and learnable cross-view transformers to map the ground-view observations to an overhead view. Given the synthesized overhead view and observed satellite feature maps, we construct a neural pose optimizer with strong global information embedding ability to estimate the relative rotation between them. After aligning their rotations, we develop an uncertainty-guided spatial correlation to generate a probability map of the vehicle locations, from which the relative translation can be determined. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. Notably, the likelihood of restricting the vehicle lateral pose to be within 1m of its Ground Truth (GT) value on the cross-view KITTI dataset has been improved from 35.54% to 76.44%, and the likelihood of restricting the vehicle orientation to be within 1circ of its GT value has been improved from 19.64% to 99.10%.