arXiv Computer Vision

SatFix: Absolute Visual Localization of UAVs in Satellite Maps from a Single Oblique Image

SatFix is a feed‑forward framework that performs absolute visual localization of UAVs in satellite maps using a single oblique image or a short multi‑view clip. It replaces traditional cross‑view retrieval by regressing a continuous 3‑DoF pose—2D position and heading—directly from satellite‑grid features without requiring a 3D map or auxiliary sensors. On the newly introduced University‑Metric dataset, SatFix localizes over half of test frames within 50 m and achieves median errors of 45.66 m and 20.81° with a single view, improving further with multiple views.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

SatNav: A Scalable Benchmark for Long-Horizon UAV Vision-Language Navigation from Satellite Imagery

SatNav is a new, scalable benchmark for long‑horizon vision‑language navigation (VLN) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), built from high‑resolution satellite imagery. It generates 118,000 navigation episodes across 59 scenes in 18 cities, using satellite crops to approximate UAV nadir views and featuring three task families—Boundary, Landmark, and Route—to test long‑term memory and geospatial reasoning. The benchmark also introduces SwiftVLN, a modular framework for memory component experimentation, and demonstrates that models trained on satellite data can transfer to real‑flight UAV observations.

By Jiajun Jiang, Chunliang Hua, Zichun Chen, Yanxing Wu, Zeyuan Yang, Jie Song, Xiao Hu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

RIM: A Retrieval-In-Matching Framework for Cross-Domain Global Visual Localization of UAVs

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 Computer Vision
Oct 2

Wrivinder: Towards Spatial Intelligence for Geo-locating Ground Images onto Satellite Imagery

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
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

The Gap Is in the Geometry: A Convergent Meta-Analysis of Multi-Facet Aerial and Remote Sensing Video Understanding

arXiv:2610.19102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aerial and remote sensing video is increasingly evaluated like web video, by posing multiple-choice questions to multimodal large language models (MLLM...

By Georgios Angelidis, Aggelos Psiris, Maria Vakalopoulou, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos, Giorgos Sfikas, Iraklis Varlamis
arXiv AI
Jul 14

VehAnchor: Metadata-Free Metric Scale Recovery from Vehicle Cues in Aerial Imagery

arXiv:2603. 04277v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous aerial robots operating in GPS-denied or communication-degraded environments frequently lose access to camera metadata and telemetry, leaving onboard perception systems unable to recover the absolute metric scale of the scene.

By Yifei Chen, Chenqian Le, Jiayi Cheng, Xupeng Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

GeoFF3D: Coordinate-Anchored Feed-Forward Reconstruction for Large-Scale UAV Mapping

GeoFF3D is a new feed‑forward 3D reconstruction method designed for large‑scale UAV mapping. It uses a coordinate‑anchored model that predicts camera poses and dense point maps directly in a gravity‑aligned Z‑up metric frame, while a spatial large‑scale reconstruction framework (SLRF) partitions images into overlapping chunks, propagates shared‑view priors, and aggregates local reconstructions hierarchically. Across nine aerial mapping blocks, GeoFF3D achieves the best average reconstruction quality, improving F@5 from 0.829 to 0.877, and can reconstruct 2,000 images in about five minutes.

By Xiang Yang, Yongli Wang, Yunsheng Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 25

RACO: Reliability-Aware Coarse-Goal Optimization for Inspection-Oriented UAV Vision-Language Navigation

The paper introduces RACO, a reliability‑aware adaptive coarse‑to‑fine navigation framework for inspection‑oriented UAV vision‑language navigation. It treats the coarse goal as a runtime hypothesis, using object‑level anchors to correct localization before and at the transition to the fine stage, and applies scale‑adaptive terminal refinement for near‑miss cases. RACO is evaluated on the new LG‑UVI inspection setting and outperforms the HETT baseline by 9.53 and 7.98 percentage points on validation‑unseen and test‑unseen, respectively, while improving inspection‑region arrival and reducing false verification risk.

By Sen Wang, Yiming Sun, Jiaxuan He, Pengfei Zhu