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.
Global visual localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using remote-sensing reference maps has attracted increasing attention. However, acquisition-time and imaging-platform differences between UAV and reference imagery induce substantial cross-domain appearance and viewpoint shifts, challenging robust six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation.
arXiv:2607.20116v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Global visual localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using remote-sensing reference maps has attracted increasing attention. However, diff...
ARC‑Loc introduces a new cross‑view localization method that bypasses heavy Bird’s‑Eye‑View transformations and external depth models. By converting ground keypoints into azimuthal rays on a satellite map and exploiting their convergence at the user’s location, the approach uses a minimal Azimuthal Ray Convergence solver and an ARC loss to directly match ground and satellite images. Experiments on VIGOR and KITTI show that ARC‑Loc achieves competitive accuracy while offering faster, memory‑efficient inference and easy integration with existing frameworks.
OpenCVL is a large, open dataset for fine-grained cross-view localization, comprising 617,388 ground‑aerial image pairs from 41 European cities. It blends high‑end sensor data with diverse in‑the‑wild images and includes a curation framework to correct pose annotations, enabling reliable evaluation. The dataset also offers cross‑area and snowy test sets to probe generalization, and experiments show that adding noisy in‑the‑wild data improves model performance on clean tests.
Visual localization becomes extremely challenging in planetary-like terrains characterized by low texture, perceptual aliasing, harsh illumination, and sparse, weakly overlapping viewpoints induced by forward rover motion and unconstrained driving directions. Under these conditions, state-of-the-art image-to-image and image-to-map matching pipelines suffer significant performance degradation.
arXiv:2607. 07737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: GNSS-denied unmanned aerial vehicles require occasional absolute position fixes to bound the drift of visual-inertial odometry.
arXiv:2610.01589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained 3D encoders are typically developed on globally reconstructed scenes expressed in a consistent world coordinate frame, whereas embodied syst...
arXiv:2608. 16658v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-view Video Geo-localization (CVG) aims to localize ground-view videos by retrieving their corresponding geo-tagged aerial images.
GNSS-denied unmanned aerial vehicles require occasional absolute position fixes to bound the drift of visual-inertial odometry. Cross-view image retrieval can provide such fixes, but raw appearance is sensitive to season, illumination, viewpoint, map age, and sensor modality.
arXiv:2606. 30576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-view object geo-localization (CVOGL) aims to locate a target object from a query view (e.
The paper introduces a multimodal foundation model for lunar remote sensing, trained from scratch on SomBench—a dataset of nearly two million co‑registered tile bundles across 11 modalities at 1 m and 100 m resolutions. The model extends the TerraMind masked‑token architecture with lunar‑specific features such as explicit acquisition geometry and joint training of two spatial scales, and employs FlexiViT patch embeddings for adaptable patch sizes. Evaluation on crater detection, irregular mare patch segmentation, and polar ice prospectivity regression shows that the pretrained model matches or surpasses ImageNet‑pretrained baselines, with notable label efficiency and effective adaptation via LoRA.
UniGeo is a multimodal large language model designed for text-guided drone geo‑localization, enabling the identification of target regions in large image galleries from natural‑language descriptions. It integrates geo‑semantic understanding, cross‑view semantic generation, and candidate‑level verification within a shared vision‑language framework, establishing stable correspondences among local scene elements, spatial relations, and language. A multi‑stage training strategy progressively refines geo‑semantic learning, cross‑view mapping, and fine‑grained verification, yielding significant performance gains on GeoText‑1652, with R@10 and mAP improvements of 13.59 and 2.83 percentage points respectively.