# Map It Anywhere (MIA): Empowering Bird's Eye View Mapping using Large-scale Public Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08726 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08726/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [BEVerse: Unified Perception and Prediction in Birds-Eye-View for Vision-Centric Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09743/) (2022)
- [VIGOR: Cross-View Image Geo-localization beyond One-to-one Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12172/) (2020)
- [Predicting Semantic Map Representations from Images using Pyramid Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13402/) (2020)
- [Translating Images into Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00966/) (2021)
- [Monocular Semantic Occupancy Grid Mapping with Convolutional Variational Encoder-Decoder Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02176/) (2018)
- [OrienterNet: Visual Localization in 2D Public Maps with Neural Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02009/) (2023)
- [MonoLayout: Amodal scene layout from a single image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08394/) (2020)
- [Bird's-Eye-View Panoptic Segmentation Using Monocular Frontal View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03227/) (2021)
- [Online Vectorized HD Map Construction using Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03341/) (2023)
- [SNAP: Self-Supervised Neural Maps for Visual Positioning and Semantic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05407/) (2023)
- [SkyEye: Self-Supervised Bird's-Eye-View Semantic Mapping Using Monocular Frontal View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04233/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-driven Planner for Exploration and Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11907/) (2022)
- [Spatial Action Maps for Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09141/) (2020)
- [TerrainNet: Visual Modeling of Complex Terrain for High-speed, Off-road Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15771/) (2023)
- [MapPrior: Bird's-Eye View Map Layout Estimation with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12963/) (2023)
- [Learning Risk-Aware Costmaps via Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Off-Road Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00134/) (2023)
- [CrowdDriven: A New Challenging Dataset for Outdoor Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04527/) (2021)
- [Improving Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation by Task Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01925/) (2024)
- [MapFormer: Boosting Change Detection by Using Pre-change Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17859/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [RayFronts: Open-Set Semantic Ray Frontiers for Online Scene Understanding and Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06994/) (2025)
- [MapEx: Indoor Structure Exploration with Probabilistic Information Gain from Global Map Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15590/) (2024)
- [Just Zoom In: Cross-View Geo-Localization via Autoregressive Zooming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25686/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Hierarchical Re-Localization in OpenStreetMap via Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01613/) (2026)
- [AutoCompass: Accurate Visual Localization on Public Maps by Learning from Weak Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02798/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Top-down Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps are a popular representation for ground robot navigation due to their richness and flexibility for downstream tasks. While recent methods have shown promise for predicting BEV maps from First-Person View (FPV) images, their generalizability is limited to small regions captured by current autonomous vehicle-based datasets. In this context, we show that a more scalable approach towards generalizable map prediction can be enabled by using two large-scale crowd-sourced mapping platforms, Mapillary for FPV images and OpenStreetMap for BEV semantic maps. We introduce Map It Anywhere (MIA), a data engine that enables seamless curation and modeling of labeled map prediction data from existing open-source map platforms. Using our MIA data engine, we display the ease of automatically collecting a dataset of 1.2 million pairs of FPV images & BEV maps encompassing diverse geographies, landscapes, environmental factors, camera models & capture scenarios. We further train a simple camera model-agnostic model on this data for BEV map prediction. Extensive evaluations using established benchmarks and our dataset show that the data curated by MIA enables effective pretraining for generalizable BEV map prediction, with zero-shot performance far exceeding baselines trained on existing datasets by 35%. Our analysis highlights the promise of using large-scale public maps for developing & testing generalizable BEV perception, paving the way for more robust autonomous navigation. Website: https://mapitanywhere.github.io/