AeroMap3D: Anchoring Monocular UAV 6-DoF Localization to Visual-Geometric-Semantic Map Priors

Aerial 6DoF localization typically relies on precise GNSS signals or radiometrically rich 3D reconstructions, limiting scalability and on-board deployment. We propose SemCityLoc, a semantic-geometric alignment system that reframes aerial pose estimation as structured surface registration between foundation-model-derived visual priors and standardized LoD-compliant 3D city models. Instead of matching sparse contours or dense texture, our method aligns semantic surfaces and monocular depth with lightweight semantic 3D building models, increasing pose discriminability in repetitive and occluded urban environments. To enable accurate evaluation, we introduce SemCityLockeD, the first real-world benchmark combining centimeter-accurate UAV poses with standardized LoD1--LoD3 semantic city models and challenging low-altitude imagery. Experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over existing map-based approaches, improving recall by up to 36% and reducing mean positional error from 9.89m to 2.62m in challenging urban canyons. Our results indicate that semantically structured geometry provides sufficient and scalable constraints for high-precision aerial localization without radiometric scene reconstructions. The code and data are available at https://albertchen98.github.io/SemCityLoc.

Reliable backup localization for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in GNSS-denied nighttime conditions remains an open challenge due to the severe modality gap between daytime RGB maps and nighttime thermal imagery. This work presents a semantic reprojection framework for map-relative nighttime UAV localization by aligning segmented thermal observations with a globally referenced, semantically labeled 3D map constructed from daytime RGB data. Rather than relying on appearance-based correspondence, localization is formulated in a shared semantic domain and solved via a symmetric bidirectional reprojection objective with confusion-aware weighting to improve robustness under segmentation uncertainty. The approach is evaluated offline across 6.5 km of nighttime, real-world UAV flight trajectories in urban and semi-structured environments. Relative to RTK GNSS ground truth, the system achieves a bias-corrected RMSE2D of 2.18 m and a median RMSE2D of 1.52 m. Results show that localization performance is strongly correlated with the availability of semantic edge evidence and that large-error events are spatially localized to semantically ambiguous areas rather than uniformly distributed. These findings indicate that semantic reprojection offers a promising pathway toward globally referenced nighttime UAV localization using thermal imagery alone.

Real-time, drift-free UAV geo-localization is essential for autonomous missions in GNSS-denied environments. The pioneering system, PiLoT, achieves high precision via Neural Pixel-to-3D Registration, aligning UAV video streams with a single rendered reference view from 3D meshes. However, its reliance on heavy 3D meshes incurs massive storage overheads, complex map acquisition, and significant computational rendering costs, severely hindering deployment on embedded platforms. To address these bottlenecks, we propose PiLoT v2, a lightweight yet robust evolution that shifts the paradigm to direct pixel-to-orthogonal map registration for free-view UAV geo-localization. By leveraging True Digital Orthophoto Maps (TDOMs) and Digital Surface Models (DSMs) as the reference substrate, PiLoT v2 replaces GPU-intensive 3D rendering with a highly efficient, CPU-friendly map cropping operation. To bridge the severe geometric discrepancy between these 2.5D orthogonal crops and free-view oblique UAV imagery, we train a cross-view feature registration network using a novel, large-scale geometrically annotated dataset. Furthermore, we integrate onboard sensor prior--specifically gravity direction and single-point laser rang--directly into the pose optimization manifold to enhance robustness against cross-view visual degradation. Experimental results demonstrate that PiLoT v2 achieves performance comparable to, or even exceeding, its Pixel-to-3D predecessor, while offering drastically lower storage and computational costs.