# Where am I? Cross-View Geo-localization with Natural Language Descriptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17007 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17007/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05922/) (2023)
- [Generic Attention-model Explainability for Interpreting Bi-Modal and Encoder-Decoder Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15679/) (2021)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Study of Training End-to-End Vision-and-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02387/) (2021)
- [Multi-Grained Vision Language Pre-Training: Aligning Texts with Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08276/) (2021)
- [Touchdown: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12354/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Visual Semantic Reasoning for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02701/) (2019)
- [Lending Orientation to Neural Networks for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12351/) (2019)
- [AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00688/) (2023)
- [University-1652: A Multi-view Multi-source Benchmark for Drone-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12186/) (2020)
- [Dual-Path Convolutional Image-Text Embeddings with Instance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05535/) (2017)
- [Where am I looking at? Joint Location and Orientation Estimation by Cross-View Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03860/) (2020)
- [Sample4Geo: Hard Negative Sampling For Cross-View Geo-Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11851/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified Text-based Person Retrieval: A Large-scale Multi-Attribute and Language Search Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02898/) (2023)
- [Open-World Entity Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14228/) (2021)
- [Cross-view Geo-localization via Learning Disentangled Geometric Layout Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04074/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Cross-View Geo-Localization Using a Correlation-Aware Homography Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16906/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Spot the Fake: Large Multimodal Model-Based Synthetic Image Detection with Artifact Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14905/) (2025)
- [BLINK-Twice: You see, but do you observe? A Reasoning Benchmark on Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09361/) (2025)
- [WeatherPrompt: Multi-modality Representation Learning for All-Weather Drone Visual Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09560/) (2025)
- [UrbanFeel: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Temporal and Perceptual Understanding of City Scenes through Human Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22228/) (2025)
- [SpotAgent: Grounding Visual Geo-localization in Large Vision-Language Models through Agentic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09463/) (2026)
- [VLM-Loc: Localization in Point Cloud Maps via Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09826/) (2026)
- [Evaluation of Geolocation Capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models and Analysis of Associated Privacy Risks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23481/) (2025)
- [VICI: VLM-Instructed Cross-view Image-localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04107/) (2025)
- [Towards Interpretable Geo-localization: a Concept-Aware Global Image-GPS Alignment Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01910/) (2025)
- [Are VLMs Lost Between Sky and Space? LinkS2Bench for UAV-Satellite Dynamic Cross-View Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02020/) (2026)
- [DisasterTD: Disaster Toponym Disambiguation Using Multimodal LLMs and Cross-View Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24856/) (2026)
- [Robust Drone-View Geo-Localization via Content-Viewpoint Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11822/) (2025)
- [The Semantic Lifecycle in Embodied AI: Acquisition, Representation and Storage via Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08876/) (2026)
- [A Parameter-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Cross-Modal Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20291/) (2025)
- [Global Cross-Modal Geo-Localization: A Million-Scale Dataset and a Physical Consistency Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08491/) (2026)
- [RHO: Robust Holistic OSM-Based Metric Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27758/) (2026)
- [Unifying UAV Cross-View Geo-Localization via 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01747/) (2026)
- [Spatially-Weighted CLIP for Street-View Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04357/) (2026)
- [Turning Generators into Retrievers: Unlocking MLLMs for Natural Language-Guided Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10721/) (2026)
- [DialogueVPR: Towards Conversational Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14115/) (2026)
- [SeqLoc: Beyond the Single Frame for Cross-View Geo-Localization in Feature-Sparse Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07835/) (2026)
- [Wrivinder: Towards Spatial Intelligence for Geo-locating Ground Images onto Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14929/) (2026)
- [VFM-Loc: Training-Free Cross-View Geo-Localization via Aligning Discriminative Visual Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13855/) (2026)
- [GeoRouter: Dynamic Paradigm Routing for Worldwide Image Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24376/) (2026)
- [TOL: Textual Localization with OpenStreetMap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01644/) (2026)
- [Where Do Vision-Language Models Fail? World Scale Analysis for Image Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16248/) (2026)
- [Road Maps as Free Geometric Priors: Weather-Invariant Drone Geo-Localization with GeoFuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14925/) (2026)
- [MAPS: Multi-Anchor Projection Similarity for Joint Vision-Language Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22543/) (2026)
- [RASR: Range-Aware Scale Recovery for Metric UAV Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09815/) (2026)
- [Trajectory-aware Cross-view Geo-localization with Sequential Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15491/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-view geo-localization identifies the locations of street-view images by matching them with geo-tagged satellite images or OSM. However, most existing studies focus on image-to-image retrieval, with fewer addressing text-guided retrieval, a task vital for applications like pedestrian navigation and emergency response. In this work, we introduce a novel task for cross-view geo-localization with natural language descriptions, which aims to retrieve corresponding satellite images or OSM database based on scene text descriptions. To support this task, we construct the CVG-Text dataset by collecting cross-view data from multiple cities and employing a scene text generation approach that leverages the annotation capabilities of Large Multimodal Models to produce high-quality scene text descriptions with localization details. Additionally, we propose a novel text-based retrieval localization method, CrossText2Loc, which improves recall by 10% and demonstrates excellent long-text retrieval capabilities. In terms of explainability, it not only provides similarity scores but also offers retrieval reasons. More information can be found at https://yejy53.github.io/CVG-Text/ .