Geometric Consistency Protocol for Foundation Model Features in Multi-View Satellite Imagery

Standardized evaluation protocols are indispensable for robust benchmarking in remote sensing, particularly as foundation features are increasingly transferred across diverse sensors and complex imaging geometries. In satellite multi-view reconstruction, conventional evaluations relying on unconstrained 2D global matching are often misleading. The Rational Function Model (RFM) and its Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPC) dictate a curved, height-dependent epipolar geometry that render flat 2D search spaces physically inconsistent. We propose a geometry-faithful and reproducible protocol tailored for the RPC framework. Our approach integrates an RPC-projected 3D consistency metric with a geometry-constrained dense matching proxy, specifically evaluating whether similarity responses remain localized and unique under physically plausible search manifolds. A pivotal finding of our joint reporting strategy is the decoupling of semantic agreement and geometric localization: high cross-view similarity at a projected 3D point does not guarantee reliable matchability in practical inference. Our benchmark demonstrates that incorporating geometric constraints is fundamental to the problem definition in satellite imagery. Furthermore, we show that state-of-the-art 2D backbones remain remarkably competitive against specialized 3D-aware models when subjected to this RPC-consistent evaluation.

Comparative Analysis of Advanced Feature Matching Algorithms in Challenging High Spatial Resolution Optical Satellite Stereo Scenarios

Feature matching determines the orientation accuracy for the High Spatial Resolution (HSR) optical satellite stereos, subsequently impacting several significant applications such as 3D reconstruction and change detection. However, the matching of off-track HSR optical satellite stereos often encounters challenging conditions including wide-baseline observation, significant radiometric differences, multi-temporal changes, varying spatial resolutions, inconsistent spectral resolution, and diverse sensors. In this study, we evaluate various advanced feature matching algorithms for HSR optical satellite stereos. Utilizing a specially constructed dataset from five satellites across six challenging scenarios, HSROSS Dataset, we conduct a comparative analysis of four algorithms: the traditional SIFT, and deep-learning based methods including SuperPoint + SuperGlue, SuperPoint + LightGlue, and LoFTR. Our findings highlight overall superior performance of SuperPoint + LightGlue in balancing robustness, accuracy, distribution, and efficiency, showcasing its potential in complex HSR optical satellite scenarios.

SG-BEV: Satellite-Guided BEV Fusion for Cross-View Semantic Segmentation

This paper aims at achieving fine-grained building attribute segmentation in a cross-view scenario, i.e., using satellite and street-view image pairs. The main challenge lies in overcoming the significant perspective differences between street views and satellite views. In this work, we introduce SG-BEV, a novel approach for satellite-guided BEV fusion for cross-view semantic segmentation. To overcome the limitations of existing cross-view projection methods in capturing the complete building facade features, we innovatively incorporate Bird's Eye View (BEV) method to establish a spatially explicit mapping of street-view features. Moreover, we fully leverage the advantages of multiple perspectives by introducing a novel satellite-guided reprojection module, optimizing the uneven feature distribution issues associated with traditional BEV methods. Our method demonstrates significant improvements on four cross-view datasets collected from multiple cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Boston. On average across these datasets, our method achieves an increase in mIOU by 10.13% and 5.21% compared with the state-of-the-art satellite-based and cross-view methods. The code and datasets of this work will be released at https://github.com/yejy53/SG-BEV.