# Weakly-supervised Camera Localization by Ground-to-satellite Image Registration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06471 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06471/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2024.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)
- [Harmonic Networks: Deep Translation and Rotation Equivariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.04642/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Simple-BEV: What Really Matters for Multi-Sensor BEV Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07959/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Boosting 3-DoF Ground-to-Satellite Camera Localization Accuracy via Geometry-Guided Cross-View Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08015/) (2023)
- [Accurate 3-DoF Camera Geo-Localization via Ground-to-Satellite Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14148/) (2022)
- [Towards Natural Language-Guided Drones: GeoText-1652 Benchmark with Spatial Relation Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12751/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Street-to-Aerial View Image Geo-localization and Orientation Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11592/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05915/) (2023)
- [Semantic Cross-View Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00098/) (2015)
- [Cross-View Image Sequence Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14295/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [FG2: Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization by Fine-Grained Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18725/) (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)
- [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)
- [ViewBridge:Revisiting Cross-View Localization from Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10716/) (2025)
- [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)
- [SatDreamer360: Multiview-Consistent Generation of Ground-Level Scenes from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00600/) (2025)
- [Seeing Across Skies and Streets: Feedforward 3D Reconstruction from Satellite, Drone, and Ground Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07978/) (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)
- [OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25274/) (2026)
- [AutoCompass: Accurate Visual Localization on Public Maps by Learning from Weak Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02798/) (2026)
- [ARC-Loc: Leveraging Azimuthal Ray Convergence as a Geometric Cue for Direct Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04965/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ground-to-satellite image matching/retrieval was initially proposed for city-scale ground camera localization. This work addresses the problem of improving camera pose accuracy by ground-to-satellite image matching after a coarse location and orientation have been obtained, either from the city-scale retrieval or from consumer-level GPS and compass sensors. Existing learning-based methods for solving this task require accurate GPS labels of ground images for network training. However, obtaining such accurate GPS labels is difficult, often requiring an expensive colorblackReal Time Kinematics (RTK) setup and suffering from signal occlusion, multi-path signal disruptions, etc. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a weakly supervised learning strategy for ground-to-satellite image registration when only noisy pose labels for ground images are available for network training. It derives positive and negative satellite images for each ground image and leverages contrastive learning to learn feature representations for ground and satellite images useful for translation estimation. We also propose a self-supervision strategy for cross-view image relative rotation estimation, which trains the network by creating pseudo query and reference image pairs. Experimental results show that our weakly supervised learning strategy achieves the best performance on cross-area evaluation compared to recent state-of-the-art methods that are reliant on accurate pose labels for supervision.