Chapter 1 - IROS 2024 Paper Accepted! 🎉

🦜🌍 BEV-CV: Birds-Eye-View Transform for Cross-View Geo-Localisation 📡🗺️

Tavis Shore Simon Hadfield Oscar Mendez

Centre for Vision, Speech, and Signal Processing (CVSSP)

University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, United Kingdom

📓 Description

Cross-view image matching for geo-localisation is a challenging problem due to the significant visual difference between aerial and ground-level viewpoints. The method provides localisation capabilities from geo-referenced images, eliminating the need for external devices or costly equipment. This enhances the capacity of agents to autonomously determine their position, navigate, and operate effectively in GNSS-denied environments. Current research employs a variety of techniques to reduce the domain gap such as applying polar transforms to aerial images or synthesising between perspectives. However, these approaches generally rely on having a 360° field of view, limiting real-world feasibility. We propose BEV-CV, an approach introducing two key novelties with a focus on improving the real-world viability of cross-view geo-localisation. Firstly bringing ground-level images into a semantic Birds-Eye-View before matching embeddings, allowing for direct comparison with aerial image representations. Secondly, we adapt datasets into application realistic format - limited Field-of-View images aligned to vehicle direction. BEV-CV achieves state-of-the-art recall accuracies, improving Top-1 rates of 70° crops of CVUSA and CVACT by 23% and 24% respectively. Also decreasing computational requirements by reducing floating point operations to below previous works, and decreasing embedding dimensionality by 33% - together allowing for faster localisation capabilities.

📊 Benchmark Results

Model	Orientation Aware	R@1	R@5	R@10	R@1%	R@1	R@5	R@10	R@1\%
		CVUSA 90°				CVUSA 70°
CVM	❌	2.76	10.11	16.74	55.49	2.62	9.30	15.06	21.77
CVFT	❌	4.80	14.84	23.18	61.23	3.79	12.44	19.33	55.56
DSM	❌	16.19	31.44	39.85	71.13	8.78	19.90	27.30	61.20
L2LTR	❌	26.92	50.49	60.41	86.88	13.95	33.07	43.86	77.65
TransGeo	❌	30.12	54.18	63.96	89.18	16.43	37.28	48.02	80.75
GeoDTR	❌	18.81	43.36	57.94	88.14	14.84	38.03	51.27	88.17
BEV-CV	❌	15.17	33.91	45.33	82.53	14.03	32.32	43.25	81.48
GAL	≈	22.54	44.36	54.17	84.59	15.20	32.86	42.06	75.21
DSM	✅	33.66	51.70	59.68	82.46	20.88	36.99	44.70	71.10
L2LTR	✅	25.21	51.90	63.54	91.16	22.20	46.71	58.99	89.37
TransGeo	✅	21.96	45.35	56.49	86.80	17.27	38.95	49.44	81.34
GeoDTR	✅	15.21	39.32	52.27	88.72	14.00	35.28	47.77	86.39
BEV-CV	✅	32.11	58.36	69.06	92.99	27.40	52.94	64.47	90.94
		CVACT 90°				CVACT 70°
CVM	❌	1.47	5.70	9.64	38.05	1.24	4.98	8.42	34.74
CVFT	❌	1.85	6.28	10.54	39.25	1.49	5.13	8.19	34.59
DSM	❌	18.11	33.34	40.94	68.65	8.29	20.72	27.13	57.08
L2LTR	❌	13.07	30.38	41.00	76.07	6.67	15.94	23.45	49.37
TransGeo	❌	10.75	28.22	37.51	70.15	7.01	19.44	27.50	62.19
GeoDTR	❌	26.53	53.26	64.59	91.13	16.87	40.22	53.13	87.92
BEV-CV	❌	4.14	14.46	22.64	61.18	3.92	13.50	20.53	59.34
GAL	≈	26.05	49.23	59.26	85.60	14.17	32.96	43.24	77.49
DSM	✅	31.17	51.44	60.05	82.90	18.44	35.87	44.39	71.97
L2LTR	✅	33.62	46.28	58.21	78.62	28.65	53.59	65.02	90.48
TransGeo	✅	28.16	34.44	41.54	67.15	24.05	42.68	55.47	80.72
GeoDTR	✅	26.76	53.65	65.35	92.12	15.38	37.09	49.40	86.38
BEV-CV	✅	45.79	75.85	83.97	96.76	37.85	69.00	78.52	95.03

📗 Related Works

🍝 SpaGBOL: Spatial-Graph-Based Orientated Localisation

     

✒️ Citation

If you find BEV-CV useful for your work please cite:

@INPROCEEDINGS{bevcv,
    author={Shore, Tavis and Hadfield, Simon and Mendez, Oscar },
    booktitle={2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)}, 
    title={BEV-CV: Birds-Eye-View Transform for Cross-View Geo-Localisation}, 
    year={2024},
    pages={11047-11054},
}

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