Cross-View Geo-Localization with Street-View and VHR Satellite Imagery in Decentrality Settings

Cross-View Geo-Localization tackles the problem of image geo-localization in GNSS-denied environments by matching street-view query images with geo-tagged aerial-view reference images. However, existing datasets and methods often assume center-aligned settings or only consider limited decentrality (i.e., the offset of the query image from the reference image center). This assumption overlooks the challenges present in real-world applications, where large decentrality can significantly enhance localization efficiency but simultaneously lead to a substantial degradation in localization accuracy. To address this limitation, we introduce CVSat, a novel dataset designed to evaluate cross-view geo-localization with a large geographic scope and diverse landscapes, emphasizing the decentrality issue. Meanwhile, we propose AuxGeo (Auxiliary Enhanced Geo-Localization), which leverages a multi-metric optimization strategy with two novel modules: the Bird's-eye view Intermediary Module (BIM) and the Position Constraint Module (PCM). BIM uses bird's-eye view images derived from street-view panoramas as an intermediary, simplifying the cross-view challenge with decentrality to a cross-view problem and a decentrality problem. PCM leverages position priors between cross-view images to establish multi-grained alignment constraints. These modules improve the performance of cross-view geo-localization with the decentrality problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AuxGeo outperforms previous methods on our proposed CVSat dataset, mitigating the issue of large decentrality, and also achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing public datasets such as CVUSA, CVACT, and VIGOR.