Qingyang Liu, David G Shatwell, Parth Parag Kulkarni +1cs.CV
Pixel-level cross-view geo-registration aims to align a query image (e.g., drone) to a geo-referenced satellite map so that every query pixel can be mapped to real-world GPS coordinates. Despite strong progress in cross-view geo-localization, existing benchmarks largely provide only GPS labels, limiting evaluation to a single coordinate per image and leaving dense geodetic alignment underexplored. We introduce SkyReg, a dataset and standardized benchmark for pixel-level drone-to-satellite geo-registration, providing dense per-pixel geo-location supervision across diverse settings (orthographic and perspective), scene types (urban, landmark-centric, suburban/rural), and camera configurations. Using SkyReg, we evaluate a broad set of baselines spanning retrieval, feature matching, homography-based alignment, and feed-forward 3D reconstruction. Finally, cross-view pairs from SkyReg, we train a geometry-aware reconstruction pipeline that achieves state-of-the-art results,improving performance by a significant margin.
Air-ground cross-view referring person detection is a necessary component in the language-to-perception-to-control chain of collective embodied intelligence, grounding a language command into the same physical target before ground and aerial agents can coordinate downstream actions. Existing referring expression comprehension and open-vocabulary grounding methods do not jointly account for cross-view identity consistency, making them insufficient for Air-Ground Cross-View Referring Person Detection (AGCV-RPD), which involves similar pedestrian distractors, weak aerial appearance cues, and cross-view identity consistency. To study this problem, we introduce Air-Ground Paired Identity-Aware Referring (A-PAIR), the first comprehensive AGCV-RPD benchmark, containing 22,137 cross-view referring samples. To construct A-PAIR efficiently, we propose Factorized Annotation and Referential Alignment (FARA), a semi-automatic annotation framework that generates factorized referring descriptions and identity-consistency supervision at reduced cost. We propose Identity-Consistent Referring Grounding (ICRG), a framework that combines factorized referential grounding, candidate-completeness supervision, and cross-view consistency calibration for joint air-ground pair selection. ICRG improves ground, aerial, and pair-level detection over strong baselines, increasing pair F1 from 16.65% to 22.28%. These results show that AGCV-RPD requires paired detection and identity-consistent reasoning.
Humans can effortlessly reason about scenes across different viewpoints, yet it remains unclear whether Vision-Language Models (VLMs) possess similar cross-view spatial abilities. Satellite-street scene pairs, with their complex contexts and extreme viewpoint variations, provide an ideal testbed. Motivated by this, we introduce CVSBench, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating cross-view spatial reasoning through satellite-street pairs. This benchmark supports multiple tasks, including cross-view VQA, cross-view grounding, and viewpoint identification. CVSBench comprises 3,297 cross-view image groups with 9,468 object-level annotations and 40,679 question-answer (QA) pairs, enabling systematic and controlled evaluation of cross-view spatial reasoning. Extensive evaluations reveal that advanced VLMs struggle to maintain object-level and layout consistency under drastic viewpoint changes. To bridge this gap towards human-like spatial cognition, we investigate two categories of approaches: spatially grounded reasoning and the incorporation of cognitive map inputs. Our findings demonstrate that language-only reasoning yields marginal improvements, while incorporating visual spatial imagination via a 3D scene imagination pipeline substantially improves cross-view reasoning. These results highlight the necessity of explicit visual-spatial representations for robust spatial cognition in VLMs. Our data and code are released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zlyzlyzly/CVSBench.