# GeoISF: Instance Semantic Forest Inspired Large-Scale Cross-View Geo-Localization via Ground LiDAR-to-Satellite Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28371 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28371/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Wide-Area Image Geolocalization with Aerial Reference Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03743/) (2015)
- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [Panoptic-PolarNet: Proposal-free LiDAR Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14962/) (2021)
- [Cross-view Geo-localization via Learning Disentangled Geometric Layout Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04074/) (2022)
- [Simple, Effective and General: A New Backbone for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01572/) (2023)
- [GeoDTR+: Toward generic cross-view geolocalization via geometric disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09624/) (2023)
- [ConGeo: Robust Cross-view Geo-localization across Ground View Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13965/) (2024)
- [City-wide Street-to-Satellite Image Geolocalization of a Mobile Ground Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05612/) (2022)
- [Any Way You Look At It: Semantic Crossview Localization and Mapping with LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08925/) (2022)
- [Wide-Area Geolocalization with a Limited Field of View Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11854/) (2022)
- [Energy-Based Models for Cross-Modal Localization using Convolutional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04021/) (2023)
- [AGL-NET: Aerial-Ground Cross-Modal Global Localization with Varying Scales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03187/) (2024)
- [SaliencyI2PLoc: saliency-guided image-point cloud localization using contrastive learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15577/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The problem of localization on a large-scale satellite image given a frame of query ground view point clouds remains challenging. Existing LiDAR-to-image cross-view localization methods struggle in large-scale scenarios due to limited semantic alignment and the modality gap between point clouds and satellite images. This paper introduces the large-scale LiDAR-to-image geo-localization pipeline called GeoISF. GeoISF introduces an instance semantic forest constructed using WordNet, which enhances temporal semantic representation and discriminative power by integrating semantic trees from multiple frames. By leveraging environmental semantic representation as a shared medium, GeoISF effectively bridges the modality gap and improves semantic matching accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of GeoISF in large-scale cross-view localization, 13.22 times better than the parallel LiDAR-to-image method in the R@10 metric on the KITTI dataset. The proposed method addresses the existing gap in large-scale LiDAR-to-image cross-view localization, offering a robust solution to the computational and accuracy challenges inherent in such scenarios. We will release the code as an open-source resource available online for the broader research community.
