Evaluation of Cross-View Matching to Improve Ground Vehicle Localization with Aerial Perception

Cross-view matching refers to the problem of finding the closest match to a given query ground-view image to one from a database of aerial images. If the aerial images are geotagged, then the closest matching aerial image can be used to localize the query ground-view image. Recently, due to the success of deep learning methods, a number of cross-view matching techniques have been proposed. These techniques perform well for the matching of isolated query images. In this paper, we evaluate cross-view matching for the task of localizing a ground vehicle over a longer trajectory. We use the cross-view matching module as a sensor measurement fused with a particle filter. We evaluate the performance of this method using a city-wide dataset collected in photorealistic simulation using five parameters: height of aerial images, the pitch of the aerial camera mount, field-of-view of ground camera, measurement model and resampling strategy for the particles in the particle filter.