This paper presents a novel approach for cross-view synthesis aimed at generating plausible ground-level images from corresponding satellite imagery or vice versa. We refer to these tasks as satellite-to-ground (Sat2Grd) and ground-to-satellite (Grd2Sat) synthesis, respectively. Unlike previous works that typically focus on one-to-one generation, producing a single output image from a single input image, our approach acknowledges the inherent one-to-many nature of the problem. This recognition stems from the challenges posed by differences in illumination, weather conditions, and occlusions between the two views. To effectively model this uncertainty, we leverage recent advancements in diffusion models. Specifically, we exploit random Gaussian noise to represent the diverse possibilities learnt from the target view data. We introduce a Geometry-guided Cross-view Condition (GCC) strategy to establish explicit geometric correspondences between satellite and street-view features. This enables us to resolve the geometry ambiguity introduced by camera pose between image pairs, boosting the performance of cross-view image synthesis. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses on three bench-mark cross-view datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed geometry-guided cross-view condition over baseline methods, including recent state-of-the-art approaches in cross-view image synthesis. Our method generates images of higher quality, fidelity, and diversity than other state-of-the-art approaches.

Despite advancements in navigation-assistive technology, independent outdoor traveling remains challenging for individuals with vision loss due to uncertain information. We present an outdoor navigation assistive system that collaborates with infrastructure to address these limitations. Our system includes an RGB-D inertial sensor, GPS sensor, Jetson Orin NX 16GB, and bone-conduction headphones. It improves localization accuracy through semantic segmentation, depth map enhancement (Depth-Decoder), and a prior map. The proposed semantic segmentation convolutional neural network (CNN) is designed to operate on low-compute devices, achieving competitive performance with 71.2 mean Intersection of Union (mIoU) on the Cityscapes and 74.46 mIoU on the Camvid. It operates at 209 frames per second (fps) with$480\times 848$image resolution on the GTX 1080 desktop and 50 fps on the low-compute Jetson. Additionally, our Depth-Decoder enhances raw depth maps using geometrical loss with semantic segmentation constraints and structure-from-motion. Depth-Decoder demonstrated an average deviation of 0.66m compared to 2.23m from raw depth maps for landmarks within 10m. Notably, the outcomes of both CNNs are inferred from a single RGB image. Two visually impaired individuals assessed the technology. Participant S001 completed 6/8 trials and S002 completed 7/7 trials. Infrastructure collaboration is demonstrated by using existing prior maps and by dynamically adjusting paths based on real-time information from sensing nodes, to avoid collisions with oncoming agents not visible with the wearable camera. This research provides fundamental design principles for future outdoor navigation assistive technologies, offering insights into addressing challenges for people with visual impairment and other vulnerable road users.

Vision-based localization for autonomous driving has been of great interest among researchers. When a pre-built 3D map is not available, the techniques of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) are typically adopted. Due to error accumulation, visual SLAM (vSLAM) usually suffers from long-term drift. This paper proposes a framework to increase the localization accuracy by fusing the vSLAM with a deep-learning based ground-to-satellite (G2S) image registration method. In this framework, a coarse (spatial correlation bound check) to fine (visual odometry consistency check) method is designed to select the valid G2S prediction. The selected prediction is then fused with the SLAM measurement by solving a scaled pose graph problem. To further increase the localization accuracy, we provide an iterative trajectory fusion pipeline. The proposed framework is evaluated on two well-known autonomous driving datasets, and the results demonstrate the accuracy and robustness in terms of vehicle localization. The code will be available at https://github.com/YanhaoZhang/SLAM-G2S-Fusion.

Mobile robots and autonomous vehicles are often required to function in environments where critical position estimates from sensors such as GPS become uncertain or unreliable. Single image visual place recognition (VPR) provides an alternative for localization but often requires techniques such as sequence matching to improve robustness, which incurs additional computation and latency costs. Even then, the sequence length required to localize at an acceptable performance level varies widely; and simply setting overly long fixed sequence lengths creates unnecessary latency, computational overhead, and can even degrade performance. In these scenarios it is often more desirable to meet or exceed a set target performance at minimal expense. In this paper we present an approach which uses a calibration set of data to fit a model that modulates sequence length for VPR as needed to exceed a target localization performance. We make use of a coarse position prior, which could be provided by any other localization system, and capture the variation in appearance across this region. We use the correlation between appearance variation and sequence length to curate VPR features and fit a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) for selecting the optimal length. We demonstrate that this method is effective at modulating sequence length to maximize the number of sections in a dataset which meet or exceed a target performance whilst minimizing the median length used. We show applicability across several datasets and reveal key phenomena like generalization capabilities, the benefits of curating features and the utility of non-state-of-the-art feature extractors with nuanced properties.

Image retrieval-based cross-view localization methods often lead to very coarse camera pose estimation, due to the limited sampling density of the database satellite images. In this paper, we propose a method to increase the accuracy of a ground camera’s location and orientation by estimating the relative rotation and translation between the ground-level image and its matched/retrieved satellite image. Our approach designs a geometry-guided cross-view transformer that combines the benefits of conventional geometry and learnable cross-view transformers to map the ground-view observations to an overhead view. Given the synthesized overhead view and observed satellite feature maps, we construct a neural pose optimizer with strong global information embedding ability to estimate the relative rotation between them. After aligning their rotations, we develop an uncertainty-guided spatial correlation to generate a probability map of the vehicle locations, from which the relative translation can be determined. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. Notably, the likelihood of restricting the vehicle lateral pose to be within 1m of its Ground Truth (GT) value on the cross-view KITTI dataset has been improved from 35.54% to 76.44%, and the likelihood of restricting the vehicle orientation to be within 1° of its GT value has been improved from 19.64% to 99.10%.

This paper proposes a fine-grained self-localization method for outdoor robotics that utilizes a flexible number of onboard cameras and readily accessible satellite images. The proposed method addresses limitations in existing cross-view localization methods that struggle to handle noise sources such as moving objects and seasonal variations. It is the first sparse visual-only method that enhances perception in dynamic environments by detecting view-consistent key points and their corresponding deep features from ground and satellite views, while removing off-the-ground objects and establishing homography transformation between the two views. Moreover, the proposed method incorporates a spatial embedding approach that leverages camera intrinsic and extrinsic information to reduce the ambiguity of purely visual matching, leading to improved feature matching and overall pose estimation accuracy. The method exhibits strong generalization and is robust to environmental changes, requiring only geo-poses as ground truth. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Ford Multi-AV Seasonal datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving median spatial accuracy errors below 0.5 meters along the lateral and longitudinal directions, and a median orientation accuracy error below 2°1.

Existing spatial localization techniques for au-tonomous vehicles mostly use a pre-built 3D-HD map, often constructed using a survey-grade 3D mapping vehicle, which is not only expensive but also laborious. This paper shows that by using an off-the-shelf high-definition satellite image as a ready-to-use map, we are able to achieve cross-view vehicle localization up to a satisfactory accuracy, providing a cheaper and more practical way for localization. While the utilization of satellite imagery for cross-view localization is an established concept, the conventional methodology focuses primarily on image re-trieval. This paper introduces a novel approach to cross-view localization that departs from the conventional image retrieval method. Specifically, our method develops (1) a Geometric-align Feature Extractor (GaFE) that leverages measured 3D points to bridge the geometric gap between ground and overhead views, (2) a Pose Aware Branch (PAB) adopting a triplet loss to encourage pose-aware feature extraction, and (3) a Recursive Pose Refine Branch (RPRB) using the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm to align the initial pose towards the true vehicle pose iteratively. Our method is validated on KITTI and Ford Multi-AV Seasonal datasets as ground view and Google Maps as the satellite view. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method in cross-view localization with median spatial and angular errors within 1 meter and 1°, respectively.

Can knowing where you are assist in perceiving objects in your surroundings, especially under adverse weather and lighting conditions? In this work we investigate whether a prior map can be leveraged to aid in the detection of dynamic objects in a scene without the need for a 3D map or pixel-level map-query correspondences. We contribute an algorithm which refines an initial set of candidate object detections and produces a refined subset of highly accurate detections using a prior map. We begin by using visual place recognition (VPR) to retrieve a prior map image for a given query image, then use a binary classification neural network that compares the query and prior map image regions to validate the query detection. Once our classification network is trained, on approximately 1000 query-map image pairs, it is able to improve the performance of vehicle detection when combined with an existing off-the-shelf vehicle detector. We demonstrate our approach using standard datasets across two cities (Oxford and Zurich) under different settings of train-test separation of map-query traverse pairs. We further emphasize the performance gains of our approach against alternative design choices and show that VPR suffices for the task, eliminating the need for precise ground truth localization.

Most 6-DoF localization and SLAM systems use static landmarks but ignore dynamic objects because they cannot be usefully incorporated into a typical pipeline. Where dynamic objects have been incorporated, typical approaches have attempted relatively sophisticated identification and localization of these objects, limiting their robustness or general utility. In this research, we propose a middle ground, demonstrated in the context of autonomous vehicles, using dynamic vehicles to provide limited pose constraint information in a 6-DoF frame-by-frame PnP-RANSAC localization pipeline. We refine initial pose estimates with a motion model and propose a method for calculating the predicted quality of future pose estimates, triggered by whether or not the autonomous vehicle's motion is constrained by the relative frame-to-frame location of dynamic vehicles in the environment. Our approach detects and identifies suitable dynamic vehicles to define these pose constraints to modify a pose filter, resulting in improved recall across a range of localization tolerances from 0.25m to 5m, compared to a state-of-the-art baseline single image PnP method and its vanilla pose filtering. Our constraint detection system is active for approximately 35% of the time on the Ford AV dataset and localization is particularly improved when the constraint detection is active.

Robust feature matching forms the backbone for most Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM), visual odometry, 3D reconstruction, and Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms. However, recovering feature matches from texture-poor scenes is a major challenge and still remains an open area of research. In this paper, we present a Stereo Visual Odometry (StereoVO) technique based on point and line features which uses a novel feature-matching mechanism based on an Attention Graph Neural Network that is designed to perform well even under adverse weather conditions such as fog, haze, rain, and snow, and dynamic lighting conditions such as nighttime illumination and glare scenarios. We perform experiments on multiple real and synthetic datasets to validate our method's ability to perform StereoVO under low-visibility weather and lighting conditions through robust point and line matches. The results demonstrate that our method achieves more line feature matches than state-of-the-art line-matching algorithms, which when complemented with point feature matches perform consistently well in adverse weather and dynamic lighting conditions.

This work presents a technique for localization of a smart infrastructure node, consisting of a fisheye camera, in a prior map. These cameras can detect objects that are outside the line of sight of the autonomous vehicles (AV) and send that information to AVs using V2X technology. However, in order for this information to be of any use to the AV, the detected objects should be provided in the reference frame of the prior map that the AV uses for its own navigation. Therefore, it is important to know the accurate pose of the infrastructure camera with respect to the prior map. Here we propose to solve this localization problem in two steps, (i) we perform feature matching between perspective projection of fisheye image and bird's eye view (BEV) satellite imagery from the prior map to estimate an initial camera pose, (ii) we refine the initialization by maximizing the Mutual Information (MI) between intensity of pixel values of fisheye image and reflectivity of 3D LiDAR points in the map data. We validate our method on simulated data and also present results with real world data.