# Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13610 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13610/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06395/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07828/) (2016)
- [Unlabeled Samples Generated by GAN Improve the Person Re-identification Baseline in vitro](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.07717/) (2017)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [Multi-Grained Vision Language Pre-Training: Aligning Texts with Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08276/) (2021)
- [Joint Discriminative and Generative Learning for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07223/) (2019)
- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (2023)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [How Far are VLMs from Visual Spatial Intelligence? A Benchmark-Driven Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18905/) (2025)
- [WeatherPrompt: Multi-modality Representation Learning for All-Weather Drone Visual Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09560/) (2025)
- [Echo Planning for Autonomous Driving: From Current Observations to Future Trajectories and Back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18945/) (2025)
- [Are VLMs Lost Between Sky and Space? LinkS2Bench for UAV-Satellite Dynamic Cross-View Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02020/) (2026)
- [Last-Meter Precision Navigation for UAVs: A Diffusion-Refined Aerial Visual Servoing Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04352/) (2026)
- [Robust Drone-View Geo-Localization via Content-Viewpoint Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11822/) (2025)
- [Unifying UAV Cross-View Geo-Localization via 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01747/) (2026)
- [Beyond 2D Matching: A Unified Single-Stage Framework for Geometry-Aware Cross-View Object Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30576/) (2026)
- [Parse, Search, and Confirmation: Training-Free Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Structured Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11529/) (2026)
- [SGR-OCC: Evolving Monocular Priors for Embodied 3D Occupancy Prediction via Soft-Gating Lifting and Semantic-Adaptive Geometric Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14076/) (2026)
- [GeoLink: A 3D-aware Framework to Improve Generalization for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13183/) (2026)
- [Road Maps as Free Geometric Priors: Weather-Invariant Drone Geo-Localization with GeoFuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14925/) (2026)
- [Semantic Generative Tuning for Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18714/) (2026)
- [ReLATE: Reliability-Guided Evidence Fusion for Robust UAV--Satellite cross-view Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25524/) (2026)
- [Cross-View Sequential Visual Localization with Spatio-Temporal Context Modeling for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10660/) (2026)
- [UniGeo: A Multi-modal Large Language Model for Text-Guided Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26722/) (2026)
- [The Gap Is in the Geometry: A Convergent Meta-Analysis of Multi-Facet Aerial and Remote Sensing Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19102/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing approaches to drone visual geo-localization predominantly adopt the image-based setting, where a single drone-view snapshot is matched with images from other platforms. Such task formulation, however, underutilizes the inherent video output of the drone and is sensitive to occlusions and viewpoint disparity. To address these limitations, we formulate a new video-based drone geo-localization task and propose the Video2BEV paradigm. This paradigm transforms the video into a Bird's Eye View (BEV), simplifying the subsequent inter-platform matching process. In particular, we employ Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct a 3D scene and obtain the BEV projection. Different from the existing transform methods, eg, polar transform, our BEVs preserve more fine-grained details without significant distortion. To facilitate the discriminative intra-platform representation learning, our Video2BEV paradigm also incorporates a diffusion-based module for generating hard negative samples. To validate our approach, we introduce UniV, a new video-based geo-localization dataset that extends the image-based University-1652 dataset. UniV features flight paths at 30^circ and 45^circ elevation angles with increased frame rates of up to 10 frames per second (FPS). Extensive experiments on the UniV dataset show that our Video2BEV paradigm achieves competitive recall rates and outperforms conventional video-based methods. Compared to other competitive methods, our proposed approach exhibits robustness at lower elevations with more occlusions.