Fusing Satellite Imagery and Planimetric Maps for Cross-View Localization
About
Current cross-view localization methods predominantly rely on satellite imagery as the aerial modality. Although recent work explores planimetric maps (e.g., OpenStreetMap tiles), these approaches often lag in performance. Yet both modalities are widely available and possess complementary properties. Satellite images are closer to ground-level camera imagery, offering finer detail, whereas planimetric maps contain annotated objects (e.g., streetlamps) and remain informative in areas where the ground is occluded, such as by foliage. Despite this, only one prior work provides an end-to-end method to fuse the two modalities, and it does not demonstrate their potential within state-of-the-art methods. To combine the strengths of both modalities, we propose a new fusion module that augments standard encoders and demonstrates that integrating satellite imagery with planimetric maps improves state-of-the-art single-modality methods. The module comprises (i) cross-modal conditioning, which processes each modality's encoding with awareness of the other, and (ii) a patch-level fusion rule that controls the granularity of information exchange. We achieve state-of-the-art results, reducing the mean localization error by 30.13\%. Qualitatively, the fusion adaptively selects the more informative modality, improving overall accuracy.