# DiffusionUavLoc: Visually Prompted Diffusion for Cross-View UAV Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06422 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06422/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Lending Orientation to Neural Networks for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12351/) (2019)
- [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)
- [DiffusionSat: A Generative Foundation Model for Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03606/) (2023)
- [Sample4Geo: Hard Negative Sampling For Cross-View Geo-Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11851/) (2023)
- [Each Part Matters: Local Patterns Facilitate Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11646/) (2020)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11045/) (2019)
- [SUES-200: A Multi-height Multi-scene Cross-view Image Benchmark Across Drone and Satellite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10704/) (2022)
- [Prompt-Free Diffusion: Taking "Text" out of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16223/) (2023)
- [A Transformer-Based Feature Segmentation and Region Alignment Method For UAV-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09206/) (2022)
- [Vision-Based UAV Self-Positioning in Low-Altitude Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09201/) (2022)
- [Towards Natural Language-Guided Drones: GeoText-1652 Benchmark with Spatial Relation Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12751/) (2023)
- [Unleashing Unlabeled Data: A Paradigm for Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14198/) (2024)
- [Sat2Scene: 3D Urban Scene Generation from Satellite Images with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10786/) (2024)
- [SDPL: Shifting-Dense Partition Learning for UAV-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04172/) (2024)
- [Multi-Level Embedding and Alignment Network with Consistency and Invariance Learning for Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14819/) (2024)
- [Exploring the best way for UAV visual localization under Low-altitude Multi-view Observation Condition: a Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10692/) (2025)
- [Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Using Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02408/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Satellite-Free Training for Drone-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01581/) (2026)
- [DECO: Depth-Guided Co-Visibility Reasoning for Low-Altitude UAV Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22289/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid growth of the low-altitude economy, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become key platforms for measurement and tracking in intelligent patrol systems. However, in GNSS-denied environments, localization schemes that rely solely on satellite signals are prone to failure. Cross-view image retrieval-based localization is a promising alternative, yet substantial geometric and appearance domain gaps exist between oblique UAV views and nadir satellite orthophotos. Moreover, conventional approaches often depend on complex network architectures, text prompts, or large amounts of annotation, which hinders generalization. To address these issues, we propose DiffusionUavLoc, a cross-view localization framework that is image-prompted, text-free, diffusion-centric, and employs a VAE for unified representation. We first use training-free geometric rendering to synthesize pseudo-satellite images from UAV imagery as structural prompts. We then design a text-free conditional diffusion model that fuses multimodal structural cues to learn features robust to viewpoint changes. At inference, descriptors are computed at a fixed time step t and compared using cosine similarity. On University-1652 and SUES-200, the method performs competitively for cross-view localization, especially for satellite-to-drone in University-1652.Our data and code will be published at the following URL: https://github.com/liutao23/DiffusionUavLoc.git.