ArcGeo: Localizing Limited Field-of-View Images Using Cross-View Matching

Maxim Shugaev, Ilya Semenov, Kyle Ashley, Michael Klaczynski, Naresh Cuntoor, Mun Wai Lee, Nathan Jacobs; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 209-218

Cross-view matching techniques for image geolocalization attempt to match features in ground level imagery against a collection of satellite images to determine the position of given query image. We present a novel cross-view image matching approach called ArcGeo which introduces a batch-all angular margin loss and several train-time strategies including large-scale pretraining and FoV-based data augmentation. This allows our model to perform well even in challenging cases with limited field-of-view (FoV). Further, we evaluate multiple model architectures, data augmentation approaches and optimization strategies to train a deep cross-view matching network, specifically optimized for limited FoV cases. In low FoV experiments (FoV = 90deg) our method improves top-1 image recall rate on the CVUSA dataset from 30.12% to 43.08%. We also demonstrate improved performance over the state-of-the-art techniques for panoramic cross-view retrieval, improving top-1 recall from 95.43% to 96.06% on the CVUSA dataset and from 64.52% to 79.88% on the CVACT test dataset. Lastly, we evaluate the role of large-scale pretraining for improved robustness. With appropriate pretraining on external data, our model improves top-1 recall dramatically to 66.83% for FoV = 90deg test case on CVUSA, an increase of over twice what is reported by existing approaches.