# BEV-Patch-PF: Particle Filtering with BEV-Aerial Feature Matching for Off-Road Geo-Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15111 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15111/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [VIGOR: Cross-View Image Geo-localization beyond One-to-one Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12172/) (2020)
- [FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09898/) (2025)
- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00688/) (2023)
- [Coming Down to Earth: Satellite-to-Street View Synthesis for Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06818/) (2021)
- [TartanVO: A Generalizable Learning-based VO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00359/) (2020)
- [Beyond Cross-view Image Retrieval: Highly Accurate Vehicle Localization Using Satellite Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04752/) (2022)
- [OrienterNet: Visual Localization in 2D Public Maps with Neural Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02009/) (2023)
- [Cross-View Image Matching for Geo-localization in Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07815/) (2017)
- [CricaVPR: Cross-image Correlation-aware Representation Learning for Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19231/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-aware Vision-based Metric Cross-view Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12145/) (2022)
- [Visual Cross-View Metric Localization with Dense Uncertainty Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08519/) (2022)
- [SliceMatch: Geometry-guided Aggregation for Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14651/) (2022)
- [Boosting 3-DoF Ground-to-Satellite Camera Localization Accuracy via Geometry-Guided Cross-View Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08015/) (2023)
- [Ford Multi-AV Seasonal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07969/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05915/) (2023)
- [Semantic Cross-View Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00098/) (2015)
- [Image-Based Geo-Localization Using Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00159/) (2019)
- [Super Odometry: IMU-centric LiDAR-Visual-Inertial Estimator for Challenging Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14938/) (2021)
- [Learning Dense Flow Field for Highly-accurate Cross-view Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15556/) (2023)
- [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)
- [You Are Here: Geolocation by Embedding Maps and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08797/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose BEV-Patch-PF, a GPS-free sequential geo-localization system that integrates a particle filter with learned bird's-eye-view (BEV) and aerial feature maps. From onboard RGB and depth images, we construct a BEV feature map. For each 3-DoF particle pose hypothesis, we crop the corresponding patch from an aerial feature map computed from a local aerial image queried around the approximate location. BEV-Patch-PF computes a per-particle log-likelihood by matching the BEV feature to the aerial patch feature. On two real-world off-road datasets, our method achieves 9.7x lower absolute trajectory error (ATE) on seen routes and 6.6x lower ATE on unseen routes than a retrieval-based baseline, while maintaining accuracy under dense canopy and shadow. The system runs in real time at 10 Hz on an NVIDIA Tesla T4, enabling practical robot deployment.