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.
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: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.
arXiv:2605. 16713v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong semantic recognition, yet remain brittle on elementary spatial relations such as left of, on, behind, and between.
Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced dense feature matching, yet severe in-plane rotation remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions face a fundamental dilemma: data-driven methods require inefficient parameter scaling to implicitly learn rotations, whereas strictly equivariant networks lack the semantic capacity of modern VFMs.
Open-vocabulary remote sensing segmentation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables pixel-level recognition of arbitrary categories specified by natural language, including classes unseen during training. However, geospatial domain shifts caused by heterogeneous regions, spatial resolutions, and acquisition platforms weaken visual-text matching and limit cross-dataset generalization.
arXiv:2606. 10819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RS-MLLMs enable natural-language understanding and spatial reasoning over earth observation imagery.
Cross-view geo-localization is challenging due to drastic viewpoint changes and large appearance discrepancies between street-level and satellite imagery. Although existing methods often use geometric warping to expose co-visible cues, such transformations rely on restrictive spatial assumptions and inevitably introduce severe visual distortions under view-dependent visibility, yielding noisy supervision and fragile correspondences.
arXiv:2601. 19099v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision--language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views.