2022/09/23 by Lena M. Downes, Downes, Lena M., Ted J. Steiner +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robotic Path Planning Algorithms #Robotics (cs.RO) #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.11854
openalex publication_date 2022/09/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Cross-view geolocalization, a supplement or replacement for GPS, localizes an agent within a search area by matching images taken from a ground-view camera to overhead images taken from satellites or aircraft. Although the viewpoint disparity between ground and overhead images makes cross-view geolocalization challenging, significant progress has been made assuming that the ground agent has access to a panoramic camera. For example, our prior work (WAG) introduced changes in search area discretization, training loss, and particle filter weighting that enabled city-scale panoramic cross-view geolocalization. However, panoramic cameras are not widely used in existing robotic platforms due to their complexity and cost. Non-panoramic cross-view geolocalization is more applicable for robotics, but is also more challenging. This paper presents Restricted FOV Wide-Area Geolocalization (ReWAG), a cross-view geolocalization approach that generalizes WAG for use with standard, non-panoramic ground cameras by creating pose-aware embeddings and providing a strategy to incorporate particle pose into the Siamese network. ReWAG is a neural network and particle filter system that is able to globally localize a mobile agent in a GPS-denied environment with only odometry and a 90 degree FOV camera, achieving similar localization accuracy as what WAG achieved with a panoramic camera and improving localization accuracy by a factor of 100 compared to a baseline vision transformer (ViT) approach. A video highlight that demonstrates ReWAG's convergence on a test path of several dozen kilometers is available at https://youtu.be/UOBQrt8qCE.