A Comprehensive Tour and Recent Advancements toward Real-world Visual Geo-Localization

Precise geo-location of a ground image within a large-scale environment is crucial to many applications, including autonomous vehicles, robotics, wide area augmented reality and image search. Localizing the ground image by matching to an aerial/ overhead geo-referenced database has gained noticeable momentum in recent years, due to significant growth in the availability of public aerial/ overhead data with multiple modalities (such as aerial images from Google/ Bing maps, and USGS 2D and 3D data, Aerial LiDAR data, Satellite 3D Data etc.). Matching a ground image to aerial/ overhead data, whose acquisition is simpler and faster, also opens more opportunities to industrial and consumer applications. However, cross-view and cross-modal visual geo-localization comes with additional technical challenges due to dramatic changes in appearance between the ground image and aerial/ overhead database, which capture the same scene differently in time, viewpoints or/and sensor modalities. This tutorial will provide a comprehensive review on the research problem of visual geo-localization, including same-view/cross-time, cross-view, cross-modal settings to both new and experienced researchers. It also provides connection opportunities for the researchers of visual geo-localization and other related fields.