CIPER: A Unified Framework for Cross-view Image-retrieval and Pose-estimation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05011v1
• Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:31:06 GMT
• Title: CIPER: A Unified Framework for Cross-view Image-retrieval and Pose-estimation
• Abstract summary: Cross-view geo-localization estimates the geographic location of a ground image by matching it against an aerial image database.<n>Existing methods tackle this through either large-scale retrieval or precise pose estimation, but not both.<n>We propose CIPER (Cross-view Image-retrieval and Pose-estimation transformER), a single architecture that jointly performs both tasks.
• Score: 14.612259909790454
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Cross-view geo-localization estimates the geographic location of a ground image by matching it against an aerial image database. Existing methods tackle this through either large-scale retrieval or precise pose estimation, but not both: retrieval-based methods enable wide-area search at the cost of localization accuracy, while pose estimation methods achieve high precision within only a narrow search space. Naively cascading these pipelines introduces error propagation and inconsistent feature representations. We formulate cross-view geo-localization as a unified problem requiring simultaneous city-scale retrieval and precise 3-DoF pose estimation. We propose CIPER (Cross-view Image-retrieval and Pose-estimation transformER), a single architecture that jointly performs both tasks through mutually beneficial feature learning. CIPER uses a shared transformer encoder with task-specific tokens to disentangle global retrieval features from spatial localization cues. To bridge the large domain gap between ground and aerial views, we introduce a two-way transformer pose decoder that uses ground features as spatial queries for bidirectional cross-attention. A set prediction strategy further enables stable 3-DoF regression under a unified multi-task objective. Experiments on VIGOR, KITTI, and Ford Multi-AV demonstrate competitive performance, especially under limited field-of-view and arbitrary orientation conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/yurimjeon1892/CIPER.

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