# BEVLoc: Cross-View Localization and Matching via Birds-Eye-View Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06410 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06410/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [BEVFormer v2: Adapting Modern Image Backbones to Bird's-Eye-View Recognition via Perspective Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10439/) (2022)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00688/) (2023)
- [Simple-BEV: What Really Matters for Multi-Sensor BEV Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07959/) (2022)
- [TartanVO: A Generalizable Learning-based VO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00359/) (2020)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11045/) (2019)
- [OrienterNet: Visual Localization in 2D Public Maps with Neural Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02009/) (2023)
- [TartanDrive: A Large-Scale Dataset for Learning Off-Road Dynamics Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01791/) (2022)
- [SNAP: Self-Supervised Neural Maps for Visual Positioning and Semantic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05407/) (2023)
- [Visual-Inertial Navigation: A Concise Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02650/) (2019)
- [CVLNet: Cross-View Semantic Correspondence Learning for Video-based Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03660/) (2022)
- [TartanDrive 2.0: More Modalities and Better Infrastructure to Further Self-Supervised Learning Research in Off-Road Driving Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01913/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Spatiotemporal Contrastive Learning for Cross-View Video Localization in Unstructured Off-road Terrains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05250/) (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)
- [BEV-Patch-PF: Particle Filtering with BEV-Aerial Feature Matching for Off-Road Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15111/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ground to aerial matching is a crucial and challenging task in outdoor robotics, particularly when GPS is absent or unreliable. Structures like buildings or large dense forests create interference, requiring GNSS replacements for global positioning estimates. The true difficulty lies in reconciling the perspective difference between the ground and air images for acceptable localization. Taking inspiration from the autonomous driving community, we propose a novel framework for synthesizing a birds-eye-view (BEV) scene representation to match and localize against an aerial map in off-road environments. We leverage contrastive learning with domain specific hard negative mining to train a network to learn similar representations between the synthesized BEV and the aerial map. During inference, BEVLoc guides the identification of the most probable locations within the aerial map through a coarse-to-fine matching strategy. Our results demonstrate promising initial outcomes in extremely difficult forest environments with limited semantic diversity. We analyze our model's performance for coarse and fine matching, assessing both the raw matching capability of our model and its performance as a GNSS replacement. Our work delves into off-road map localization while establishing a foundational baseline for future developments in localization. Our code is available at: https://github.com/rpl-cmu/bevloc