DXPR is a depth‑based cross‑modal place recognition framework that matches monocular camera queries to a LiDAR map using a single vision foundation model backbone. By converting both modalities into a unified depth image representation, DXPR learns modality‑invariant global descriptors without modality‑specific encoders. A geometry‑aware overlap miner refines pairwise metric learning by computing pixel‑level overlap scores, and extensive tests on KITTI and Boreas show strong performance across seasons, weather, and day/night conditions, outperforming prior CMPR baselines.
Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) aims to identify the same location across heterogeneous sensing modalities, such as vision and LiDAR. Existing methods commonly bridge the modality gap using complex alignment modules, multi-stage training, or full fine-tuning of pretrained backbones.
M3GA-Wild is a new benchmark for multi-modal, multi-session ground-to-aerial place recognition in forests, combining synchronized RGB imagery and LiDAR from ground traversals with high‑resolution aerial imagery and multi‑altitude LiDAR over 370 hectares. The dataset includes accurate geo‑referenced 6‑DoF poses and spans 36 km of forest traversals, enabling systematic evaluation of visual, LiDAR, cross‑modal, and multi‑modal methods. Baseline experiments show LiDAR outperforms vision‑only approaches under severe viewpoint changes, while current multi‑modal fusion offers limited gains due to poor cross‑modal alignment, highlighting challenges in cross‑platform localisation and domain gaps.
We present M3GA-Wild, the first benchmark for multi-modal, multi-session ground-to-aerial place recognition in forests. M3GA-Wild unifies and extends existing forest localisation datasets, providing a...
arXiv:2506. 22784v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Point-pixel registration between LiDAR point clouds and camera images is a fundamental yet challenging task in autonomous driving and robotic perception.
Metric scale monocular geometry estimation has seen significant progress through large-scale data aggregation, yet current foundation models suffer from a persistent ''scale-collapse'' phenomenon: distant landmarks and vast landscapes are metrically underestimated. We hypothesize that this performance gap stems from a training data bottleneck, where existing metric-scale datasets are hardware-constrained to homogenous vehicle-captured LiDAR or short-range indoor scans, or consist of synthetic data that lacks the semantic complexity of the physical world.
SARFusion introduces a scene-aware routing approach for camera‑LiDAR 3D object detection, decoupling object‑query decoding into separate camera, LiDAR, and fusion branches. By estimating a global scene reliability prior and incorporating object‑level evidence, each query is routed to the most suitable branch, reducing cross‑modal interference. The method achieves strong performance on the nuScenes test set (72.5 mAP, 74.4 NDS) and demonstrates robustness to sensor corruptions and environmental changes.
LightLoc++ introduces a sensor‑robust framework for outdoor LiDAR localization that decouples a pretrained backbone from lightweight scene‑specific heads, enabling efficient new‑scene training. The authors present SULID, a synchronized urban multi‑LiDAR dataset featuring 32‑, 64‑, and 128‑beam sensors, which is used to pretrain a backbone via cross‑sensor consistency learning. Additional techniques such as sample classification guidance and redundant sample downsampling reduce regression ambiguity and computational load, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance with minimal new‑scene training cost.
Scene coordinate regression (SCR) achieves strong performance in outdoor LiDAR localization, but it usually requires scene-specific training that can take days, limiting practical deployment. Recent w...
arXiv:2606. 20189v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD).
arXiv:2606. 20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD).
The paper introduces DPA-I2P, a depth-guided projective alignment method for image-to-point-cloud registration in autonomous driving. It employs Ray-Conditioned Metric Depth Encoding and Projection-Consistent Vision Lifting to align depth and visual cues geometrically, and uses Cross-Modal Query Pruning to enhance matching stability. Experiments on KITTI and nuScenes show significant reductions in rotation and translation errors compared to existing implicit baselines.
arXiv:2608.13147v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Camera-based autonomous driving perception requires a shared representation that preserves metric 3D structure across synchronized multi-camera str...