# Beyond 2D Matching: A Unified Single-Stage Framework for Geometry-Aware Cross-View Object Geo-Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30576 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30576/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [π3: Permutation-Equivariant Visual Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13347/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Lending Orientation to Neural Networks for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12351/) (2019)
- [You Only Look at One Sequence: Rethinking Transformer in Vision through Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00666/) (2021)
- [TransGeo: Transformer Is All You Need for Cross-view Image Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00097/) (2022)
- [University-1652: A Multi-view Multi-source Benchmark for Drone-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12186/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Predicting Ground-Level Scene Layout from Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02709/) (2016)
- [Beyond Cross-view Image Retrieval: Highly Accurate Vehicle Localization Using Satellite Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04752/) (2022)
- [WorldMirror: Universal 3D World Reconstruction with Any-Prior Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10726/) (2025)
- [A Transformer-Based Feature Segmentation and Region Alignment Method For UAV-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09206/) (2022)
- [ViDT: An Efficient and Effective Fully Transformer-based Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03921/) (2021)
- [Vision-Based UAV Self-Positioning in Low-Altitude Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09201/) (2022)
- [Good at captioning, bad at counting: Benchmarking GPT-4V on Earth observation data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17600/) (2024)
- [GeoDTR+: Toward generic cross-view geolocalization via geometric disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09624/) (2023)
- [OmniCity: Omnipotent City Understanding with Multi-level and Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00928/) (2022)
- [Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13610/) (2024)
- [Cross-View Visual Geo-Localization for Outdoor Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15676/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Multi-View Mixture-of-Experts with Vision-Language Reranking for Cross-View Object Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18139/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-view object geo-localization (CVOGL) aims to locate a target object from a query view (e.g., ground or drone) within a geo-tagged reference image (e.g., satellite). Existing approaches heavily rely on 2D appearance matching and are constrained by limited datasets lacking geometric metadata, diverse prompts, and standard field-of-view imagery. To address these intertwined challenges, we first introduce dataset, a large-scale, high-fidelity building dataset comprising over 220,000 ground-satellite and drone-satellite pairs. It provides multi-modal prompts (points, boxes, masks) and camera poses to enable flexible target referring and explicit spatial modeling. Furthermore, we propose a novel single-stage Geometry-Aware Geo-localization framework (GAGeo), built upon the permutation-equivariant 3D foundation model π3. By seamlessly integrating visual features, referring prompts, and learnable task tokens, our model adapts the inherited 3D prior to jointly predict bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and camera poses in a single forward pass. Additionally, we introduce a contrastive loss that utilizes the satellite view as a universal anchor, implicitly aligning ground and drone representations to enable zero-shot ground-to-drone localization without requiring triplet training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, exhibiting exceptional generalization ability in unseen scenes and novel cross-view setups.