View From Above: Orthogonal-View aware Cross-view Localization
Authors: Shan Wang, Chuong Nguyen, Jiawei Liu, Yanhao Zhang, Sundaram Muthu, Fahira Afzal Maken, Kaihao Zhang, Hongdong Li

This paper presents a novel aerial-to-ground feature aggregation strategy tailored for the task of cross-view image-based geo-localization. Conventional vision-based methods heavily rely on matching ground-view image features with a pre-recorded image database often through establishing planar homography correspondences via a planar ground assumption. As such they tend to ignore features that are off-ground and not suited for handling visual occlusions leading to unreliable localization in challenging scenarios. We propose a Top-to-Ground Aggregation module that capitalizes aerial orthographic views to aggregate features down to the ground level leveraging reliable off-ground information to improve feature alignment. Furthermore we introduce a Cycle Domain Adaptation loss that ensures feature extraction robustness across domain changes. Additionally an Equidistant Re-projection loss is introduced to equalize the impact of all keypoints on orientation error leading to a more extended distribution of keypoints which benefits orientation estimation. On both KITTI and Ford Multi-AV datasets our method consistently achieves the lowest mean longitudinal and lateral translations across different settings and obtains the smallest orientation error when the initial pose is less accurate a more challenging setting. Further it can complete an entire route through continual vehicle pose estimation with initial vehicle pose given only at the starting point.