# Globally Localizing Lunar Rover in Pixels via Graph Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10602/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [VIGOR: Cross-View Image Geo-localization beyond One-to-one Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12172/) (2020)
- [DeepStereo: Learning to Predict New Views from the World's Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06825/) (2015)
- [Sample4Geo: Hard Negative Sampling For Cross-View Geo-Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11851/) (2023)
- [Beyond Cross-view Image Retrieval: Highly Accurate Vehicle Localization Using Satellite Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04752/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Cross-View Geo-Localization Using a Correlation-Aware Homography Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16906/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-aware Vision-based Metric Cross-view Geolocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12145/) (2022)
- [SliceMatch: Geometry-guided Aggregation for Cross-View Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14651/) (2022)
- [Cross-view image geo-localization with Panorama-BEV Co-Retrieval Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05475/) (2024)
- [SNAP: Self-Supervised Neural Maps for Visual Positioning and Semantic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05407/) (2023)
- [FG2: Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization by Fine-Grained Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18725/) (2025)
- [Satellite Image Based Cross-view Localization for Autonomous Vehicle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13506/) (2022)
- [Loc2: Interpretable Cross-View Localization via Depth-Lifted Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09792/) (2025)
- [LunarNav: Crater-based Localization for Long-range Autonomous Lunar Rover Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01350/) (2023)
- [Lunar Rover Localization Using Craters as Landmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10073/) (2022)
- [ViewBridge:Revisiting Cross-View Localization from Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10716/) (2025)
- [LunarLoc: Segment-Based Global Localization on the Moon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16940/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Precise rover localization is a prerequisite for autonomous lunar exploration, yet the absence of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and the cumulative drift of local localization methods severely constrain long-range missions. Cross-view localization provides a promising drift-free global solution by matching rover-view and satellite-view imagery. However, the lunar environment poses unique challenges for correspondence alignment, including inter-entity entanglement, inter-viewpoint divergence, and simulation-to-real domain shift. To address these challenges, we propose Warped Alignment of Reprojected Graphs (WARG), a framework that leverages unified graph learning and reprojected graph matching for robust cross-view alignment. Pretrained on the synthetic LuSNAR dataset, WARG achieves an average test error of 0.32 m and demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization to the synthetic lunar south pole region with an error of 3.63 m. More importantly, when validated on real-world data from the YuTu-2 rover, WARG achieves a localization error of 1.68 m within a 100 m x 100 m search area, corresponding to nearly one-pixel precision in low-resolution satellite imagery with a spatial resolution of 1.40 m/pixel. Beyond accuracy, WARG is computationally efficient, containing only 1.56M parameters, corresponding to 16.12% of previous lightweight models, and operating at 5.49 Hz on an NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU, approaching GNSS-level update frequency. Finally, we observe that WARG naturally develops low-level spatial awareness, including semantic segmentation and structural reasoning, through cross-view localization learning, highlighting its potential as a promising paradigm for spatial intelligence with minimal annotation cost. The source code is available at https://github.com/maochen-casia/warg.