Adapting Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization to Areas without Fine Ground Truth

Given a ground-level query image and a geo-referenced aerial image that covers the query's local surroundings, fine-grained cross-view localization aims to estimate the location of the ground camera inside the aerial image. Recent works have focused on developing advanced networks trained with accurate ground truth (GT) locations of ground images. However, the trained models always suffer a performance drop when applied to images in a new target area that differs from training. In most deployment scenarios, acquiring fine GT, i.e. accurate GT locations, for target-area images to re-train the network can be expensive and sometimes infeasible. In contrast, collecting images with noisy GT with errors of tens of meters is often easy. Motivated by this, our paper focuses on improving the performance of a trained model in a new target area by leveraging only the target-area images without fine GT. We propose a weakly supervised learning approach based on knowledge self-distillation. This approach uses predictions from a pre-trained model as pseudo GT to supervise a copy of itself. Our approach includes a mode-based pseudo GT generation for reducing uncertainty in pseudo GT and an outlier filtering method to remove unreliable pseudo GT. Our approach is validated using two recent state-of-the-art models on two benchmarks. The results demonstrate that it consistently and considerably boosts the localization accuracy in the target area.

Convolutional Cross-View Pose Estimation

We propose a novel end-to-end method for cross-view pose estimation. Given a ground-level query image and an aerial image that covers the query's local neighborhood, the 3 Degrees-of-Freedom camera pose of the query is estimated by matching its image descriptor to descriptors of local regions within the aerial image. The orientation-aware descriptors are obtained by using a translational equivariant convolutional ground image encoder and contrastive learning. The Localization Decoder produces a dense probability distribution in a coarse-to-fine manner with a novel Localization Matching Upsampling module. A smaller Orientation Decoder produces a vector field to condition the orientation estimate on the localization. Our method is validated on the VIGOR and KITTI datasets, where it surpasses the state-of-the-art baseline by 72% and 36% in median localization error for comparable orientation estimation accuracy. The predicted probability distribution can represent localization ambiguity, and enables rejecting possible erroneous predictions. Without re-training, the model can infer on ground images with different field of views and utilize orientation priors if available. On the Oxford RobotCar dataset, our method can reliably estimate the ego-vehicle's pose over time, achieving a median localization error under 1 meter and a median orientation error of around 1 degree at 14 FPS.

SliceMatch: Geometry-guided Aggregation for Cross-View Pose Estimation

This work addresses cross-view camera pose estimation, i.e., determining the 3-DoF camera pose of a given ground-level image w.r.t. an aerial image of the local area. We propose SliceMatch, which consists of ground and aerial feature extractors, feature aggregators, and a pose predictor. The feature extractors extract dense features from the ground and aerial images. Given a set of candidate camera poses, the feature aggregators construct a single ground descriptor and a set of rotational equivariant pose-dependent aerial descriptors. Notably, our novel aerial feature aggregator has a cross-view attention module for ground-view guided aerial feature selection, and utilizes the geometric projection of the ground camera's viewing frustum on the aerial image to pool features. The efficient construction of aerial descriptors is achieved by using precomputed masks and by re-assembling the aerial descriptors for rotated poses. SliceMatch is trained using contrastive learning and pose estimation is formulated as a similarity comparison between the ground descriptor and the aerial descriptors. SliceMatch outperforms the state-of-the-art by 19% and 62% in median localization error on the VIGOR and KITTI datasets, with 3x FPS of the fastest baseline.

Visual Cross-View Metric Localization with Dense Uncertainty Estimates

This work addresses visual cross-view metric localization for outdoor robotics. Given a ground-level color image and a satellite patch that contains the local surroundings, the task is to identify the location of the ground camera within the satellite patch. Related work addressed this task for range-sensors (LiDAR, Radar), but for vision, only as a secondary regression step after an initial cross-view image retrieval step. Since the local satellite patch could also be retrieved through any rough localization prior (e.g. from GPS/GNSS, temporal filtering), we drop the image retrieval objective and focus on the metric localization only. We devise a novel network architecture with denser satellite descriptors, similarity matching at the bottleneck (rather than at the output as in image retrieval), and a dense spatial distribution as output to capture multi-modal localization ambiguities. We compare against a state-of-the-art regression baseline that uses global image descriptors. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the recently proposed VIGOR and the Oxford RobotCar datasets validate our design. The produced probabilities are correlated with localization accuracy, and can even be used to roughly estimate the ground camera's heading when its orientation is unknown. Overall, our method reduces the median metric localization error by 51%, 37%, and 28% compared to the state-of-the-art when generalizing respectively in the same area, across areas, and across time.