# CV-Cities: Advancing Cross-View Geo-Localization in Global Cities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12431/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2024.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [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)
- [MixVPR: Feature Mixing for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02190/) (2023)
- [University-1652: A Multi-view Multi-source Benchmark for Drone-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12186/) (2020)
- [Coming Down to Earth: Satellite-to-Street View Synthesis for Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06818/) (2021)
- [Sample4Geo: Hard Negative Sampling For Cross-View Geo-Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11851/) (2023)
- [Multi-Channel Attention Selection GAN with Cascaded Semantic Guidance for Cross-View Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06807/) (2019)
- [Each Part Matters: Local Patterns Facilitate Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11646/) (2020)
- [Cross-view Geo-localization via Learning Disentangled Geometric Layout Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04074/) (2022)
- [Cross-View Image Matching for Geo-localization in Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07815/) (2017)
- [Cross-View Image Synthesis using Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03396/) (2018)
- [A Transformer-Based Feature Segmentation and Region Alignment Method For UAV-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09206/) (2022)
- [Simple, Effective and General: A New Backbone for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01572/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Street-to-Aerial View Image Geo-localization and Orientation Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11592/) (2020)
- [Image-Based Geo-Localization Using Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00159/) (2019)
- [Cross-view Geo-localization with Evolving Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00842/) (2021)
- [Cross-View Visual Geo-Localization for Outdoor Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15676/) (2023)
- [Transformer-Guided Convolutional Neural Network for Cross-View Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09967/) (2022)
- [Wide-Area Geolocalization with a Limited Field of View Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11854/) (2022)
- [Image-based Geolocalization by Ground-to-2.5D Map Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05993/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [MMS-VPR: A Fine-Grained Multimodal Street-Level Visual Place Recognition Dataset and Evaluation Benchmark for Dense Pedestrian Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12254/) (2025)
- [VICI: VLM-Instructed Cross-view Image-localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04107/) (2025)
- [Cross-View Geo-Localization with Street-View and VHR Satellite Imagery in Decentrality Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11529/) (2024)
- [Object-level Cross-view Geo-localization with Location Enhancement and Multi-Head Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17911/) (2025)
- [SkyLink: Unifying Street-Satellite Geo-Localization via UAV-Mediated 3D Scene Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24783/) (2025)
- [Learnable Query Aggregation with KV Routing for Cross-view Geo-localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23938/) (2025)
- [MOGeo: Beyond One-to-One Cross-View Object Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13843/) (2026)
- [Toward Reliable VLM: A Fine-Grained Benchmark and Framework for Exposure, Bias, and Inference in Korean Street Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03371/) (2025)
- [Global Cross-Modal Geo-Localization: A Million-Scale Dataset and a Physical Consistency Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08491/) (2026)
- [DualGeo: A Dual-View Framework for Worldwide Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25533/) (2026)
- [SeqLoc: Beyond the Single Frame for Cross-View Geo-Localization in Feature-Sparse Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07835/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Retrieval: A Case Study of Distance-Aware Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23077/) (2025)
- [Beyond Paired Data: Self-Supervised UAV Geo-Localization from Reference Imagery Alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02737/) (2025)
- [MMLANDMARKS: a Cross-View Instance-Level Benchmark for Geo-Spatial Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17492/) (2025)
- [Lifting Vision: Ground to Aerial Localization with Reasoning Guided Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24404/) (2025)
- [m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19099/) (2026)
- [Wrivinder: Towards Spatial Intelligence for Geo-locating Ground Images onto Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14929/) (2026)
- [GeoLink: A 3D-aware Framework to Improve Generalization for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13183/) (2026)
- [InfoGeo: Information-Theoretic Object-Centric Learning for Cross-View Generalizable UAV Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07099/) (2026)
- [MAPS: Multi-Anchor Projection Similarity for Joint Vision-Language Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22543/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Semantic Maps for City-Scale Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25215/) (2026)
- [CrossTimeEdit: A Decade-Spanning Cross-View Dataset and Reward-Guided Editing for Historical Street-View Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36616/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL), which involves matching and retrieving satellite images to determine the geographic location of a ground image, is crucial in GNSS-constrained scenarios. However, this task faces significant challenges due to substantial viewpoint discrepancies, the complexity of localization scenarios, and the need for global localization. To address these issues, we propose a novel CVGL framework that integrates the vision foundational model DINOv2 with an advanced feature mixer. Our framework introduces the symmetric InfoNCE loss and incorporates near-neighbor sampling and dynamic similarity sampling strategies, significantly enhancing localization accuracy. Experimental results show that our framework surpasses existing methods across multiple public and self-built datasets. To further improve globalscale performance, we have developed CV-Cities, a novel dataset for global CVGL. CV-Cities includes 223,736 ground-satellite image pairs with geolocation data, spanning sixteen cities across six continents and covering a wide range of complex scenarios, providing a challenging benchmark for CVGL. The framework trained with CV-Cities demonstrates high localization accuracy in various test cities, highlighting its strong globalization and generalization capabilities. Our datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/GaoShuang98/CVCities.