Accuracy potential of visual localization exploiting high-end street-level imagery
Authors: Jonas Meyer, Stephan Nebiker, Pascal Theiler, Norbert Haala
Organizations: Institute of Geomatics, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Hofackerstrasse 30, Muttenz, 4132, BL, Switzerland · ciNovitas AG, Schlossbergweg 3, Baden, 5400, AG, Switzerland · Institute for Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics, University of Stuttgart, Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 24D, Stuttgart, 70174, BW, Germany
Abstract
Accurate and reliable pose information with respect to a reference frame is increasingly demanded across applications such as autonomous navigation, surveying, robotics, and augmented and mixed reality. Visual localization can serve as a complementary positioning modality to GNSS, whose applicability and accuracy are often limited. Yet, the accuracy potential of visual localization has not been systematically investigated against survey-grade demands. This is mainly due to the lack of publicly available, large-scale outdoor datasets with ground-truth poses in the sub-centimeter range. In this work, we address both gaps. We introduce a scalable visual localization pipeline that employs precisely georeferenced, high-resolution street-level imagery directly as the scene representation. It combines prior-guided reference candidate selection with on-the-fly local Structure-from-Motion reconstruction and PnP-based pose estimation. We further present the FHNW Muttenz dataset, a real-world dataset covering a contiguous 10 km street network mapped in two mobile mapping campaigns approximately 1.5 years apart. It consists of high-resolution reference imagery and query sequences acquired by four different cameras across five representative scenes. All images are precisely co-registered, yielding 6-DoF ground-truth poses in the sub-centimeter range. Using this dataset, we evaluate the accuracy potential of visual localization. Our experiments demonstrate median pose accuracies in the range of 1-5 cm for translation and 0.05-0.1° for rotation, reaching as low as 1 cm and 0.03° under favorable conditions. These results show that visual localization can complement survey-grade GNSS positioning, paving the way for 3D geospatial data acquisition using consumer devices and fully automated georeferencing approaches. The dataset is publicly available at: https://fhnw-muttenz-vl-dataset.github.io/.
We present egenioussBench, a visual localisation benchmark built on geospatial reference data: a city-scale airborne 3D mesh and a CityGML LoD2 model. This pairing reflects deployable mapping assets and supports true scalability beyond traditional SfM-based approaches. The query data comprise smartphone images with centimetre-accurate, map-independent ground truth obtained via PPK and GCP/CP-aided adjustment. From 2,709 images, we derive a non-co-visible subset by estimating the full co-visibility matrix from rendered depth and selecting a maximum independent set; the released data include a test split of 42 non-co-visible images with withheld ground truth and a validation split of 412 sequential images with poses, e.g. for training of pose regressors and self-validation. The benchmark features a public leaderboard evaluated with binning metrics at multiple pose-error thresholds alongside global statistics (median, RMSE, outlier ratio), ensuring fair, like-for-like comparison across mesh- and LoD2-based methods. Together, these design choices expose realistic cross-view and cross-domain challenges while providing a rigorous, scalable path for advancing large-scale visual localisation. We make the evaluation code and data availeable at https://github.com/fratopa/egenioussBench and https://www.egeniouss.eu/
Phillipp Fanta-Jende, Francesco Vultaggio, Alexander Kern +2
We present NGPS (Next-Generation Positioning System), a visual geo-localization framework for high-altitude UAVs that provides GPS-free absolute positioning by matching down-facing images to georeferenced satellite imagery with deep features. The system combines (1) adaptive confidence-weighted UKF fusion, where NGPS covariance is modulated by RANSAC inlier ratio, reprojection error, and match confidence; (2) velocity-predictive kernel extraction, using VIO velocity to predict the satellite search region; and (3) an asynchronous multi-rate temporal priority queue that interleaves absolute position (1-2 Hz), VIO (10-20 Hz), and IMU (100-200 Hz) updates in chronological order. Globally optimized poses from VINS pose-graph optimization, anchored by NGPS corrections, further enable real-time 2.5D georeferenced orthomosaic reconstruction. On five flight sequences (60-150 m AGL), NGPS achieves 2.94 m position RMSE, with worst-case ATE 6.04 m at 150 m AGL and 2 m/s, yielding a 3.5x improvement over standalone monocular VIO. The system runs in real time on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX. Part of the implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/snktshrma/ngps_flight.
Image geolocation aims to estimate where a photograph was taken from its visual content. At worldwide scale, this remains challenging because visual evidence is often ambiguous, diverse, and unevenly distributed. Prior work has typically treated geolocation of ordinary internet photos and street-view imagery as separate tasks, despite their complementary strengths: internet photos better match the appearance distribution of user-captured queries, while street-view imagery provides denser, geographically grounded coverage. We present Pinpoint, a retrieve-and-rerank architecture that combines both sources in a coarse-to-fine pipeline. A contrastive image-GPS embedder is trained on both user-uploaded Flickr photos and street-view imagery, learning a shared image-GPS embedding space that is used to retrieve candidate locations. An attention-based reranker then rescores retrieved candidates by combining candidate-level visual and GPS features with cross-source evidence from nearby locations to ground the prediction. Unlike recent prior work, Pinpoint does not rely on multimodal large-language models, making inference faster and more reproducible. Pinpoint achieves state-of-the-art results across all metrics on standard benchmarks for internet photos (IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k) and street-view imagery (OSV-5M).