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.
By Ethan Griffiths, Maryam Haghighat, Simon Denman, Clinton Fookes, Milad Ramezani
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 30576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-view object geo-localization (CVOGL) aims to locate a target object from a query view (e.
By Liyao Wang, Ruipu Wu, Haojun Xu, Lei Shi, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu
arXiv:2602.14929v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Aligning ground-level imagery with geo-registered satellite maps is crucial for mapping, navigation, and situational awareness, yet remains challen...
By Chandrakanth Gudavalli, Tajuddin Manhar Mohammed, Abhay Yadav, Ananth Vishnu Bhaskar, Hardik Prajapati, Cheng Peng, Rama Chellappa, Shivkumar Chandrasekaran, B. S. Manjunath
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.
By Zimin Xia, Mubariz Zaffar, Junsheng Fu, Alexandre Alahi, Julian F. P. Kooij
Accurate 3D terrain maps are essential for emergency response when assessing wildfire hazards. However, wildfire-prone regions often span vast areas where conventional reconstruction methods underperform.
M3GD introduces a multimodal representation that fuses pre‑trained 2D image and 3D LiDAR foundation models for robotic novel view synthesis, avoiding the need for a separate cross‑modal translator. By projecting LiDAR onto the image latent grid and injecting the resulting geometry‑aware packets via a lightweight residual adapter, the method enhances both RGB and depth synthesis on the GrandTour dataset compared to an image‑only baseline. Ablation studies confirm that pixel‑aligned LiDAR content drives the performance gains, and real‑world deployment on a ground robot demonstrates a tunable quality–cost trade‑off.
By Yang Zhou, Jiuhong Xiao, Shizhao Ye, Long Quang, Carlos Nieto-Granda, Giuseppe Loianno
arXiv:2607. 08711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate 3D terrain maps are essential for emergency response when assessing wildfire hazards.
By Xiao Fu, Yue Hu, Meida Chen, Peter Anthony Beerel, Barath Raghavan
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.
M3GD is a novel approach for robotic novel view synthesis that fuses camera images and LiDAR point clouds without requiring a separate cross‑modal translator. By projecting LiDAR data onto the image latent grid and injecting it via a lightweight residual adapter, M3GD enhances both RGB and depth generation on the GrandTour dataset compared to image‑only baselines. Experiments on a ground robot confirm that the method can be deployed in real‑world scenarios with a tunable quality‑cost trade‑off.
arXiv:2605. 14925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Drone-view geo-localization aims to match a query drone image, often captured under adverse weather conditions (e.
By Yunsong Fang, Tingyu Wang, Zhedong Zheng