MAG-VLAQ: Multi-modal Aerial-Ground Query Aggregation for Cross-View Place Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Xu, Zhengyi, Ming, Yuhang, Zhan, Zhihao, Zhu, Hanyu, Civera, Javier, Kong, Wanzeng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911667736018944
author Xu, Zhengyi
Ming, Yuhang
Zhan, Zhihao
Zhu, Hanyu
Civera, Javier
Kong, Wanzeng
author_facet Xu, Zhengyi
Ming, Yuhang
Zhan, Zhihao
Zhu, Hanyu
Civera, Javier
Kong, Wanzeng
contents Multi-modal cross-view place recognition remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and robotics due to the severe viewpoint, modality, and spatial-structure discrepancies between ground observations and aerial references. To address this challenge, we present MAG-VLAQ, a foundation-model-enhanced query aggregation framework for multi-modal aerial-ground cross-view place recognition. Specifically, our approach leverages pre-trained foundation models to extract dense visual tokens from both ground and aerial images, as well as expressive geometric tokens from ground LiDAR observations. These heterogeneous tokens are then projected into a shared embedding space for cross-modal alignment and fusion. As our main contribution, we propose ODE-conditioned VLAQ, which tightly couples neural ordinary differential equations (ODE)-based RGB-LiDAR fusion with vectors of locally aggregated queries (VLAQ). In this design, the VLAQ query centers are dynamically adapted according to the fused multi-modal state. This mechanism allows the final global descriptor to preserve globally learned retrieval prototypes while remaining responsive to scene-specific visual and geometric evidence, significantly improving aerial-ground matching. Extensive experiments on KITTI360-AG and nuScenes-AG validate the effectiveness of our proposed MAG-VLAQ. Notably, on KITTI360-AG, our MAG-VLAQ nearly doubles the state-of-the-art performance, achieving 61.1 Recall@1 in the satellite setting, compared with 34.5 from the closest competing approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09418
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MAG-VLAQ: Multi-modal Aerial-Ground Query Aggregation for Cross-View Place Recognition
Xu, Zhengyi
Ming, Yuhang
Zhan, Zhihao
Zhu, Hanyu
Civera, Javier
Kong, Wanzeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Multi-modal cross-view place recognition remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and robotics due to the severe viewpoint, modality, and spatial-structure discrepancies between ground observations and aerial references. To address this challenge, we present MAG-VLAQ, a foundation-model-enhanced query aggregation framework for multi-modal aerial-ground cross-view place recognition. Specifically, our approach leverages pre-trained foundation models to extract dense visual tokens from both ground and aerial images, as well as expressive geometric tokens from ground LiDAR observations. These heterogeneous tokens are then projected into a shared embedding space for cross-modal alignment and fusion. As our main contribution, we propose ODE-conditioned VLAQ, which tightly couples neural ordinary differential equations (ODE)-based RGB-LiDAR fusion with vectors of locally aggregated queries (VLAQ). In this design, the VLAQ query centers are dynamically adapted according to the fused multi-modal state. This mechanism allows the final global descriptor to preserve globally learned retrieval prototypes while remaining responsive to scene-specific visual and geometric evidence, significantly improving aerial-ground matching. Extensive experiments on KITTI360-AG and nuScenes-AG validate the effectiveness of our proposed MAG-VLAQ. Notably, on KITTI360-AG, our MAG-VLAQ nearly doubles the state-of-the-art performance, achieving 61.1 Recall@1 in the satellite setting, compared with 34.5 from the closest competing approach.
title MAG-VLAQ: Multi-modal Aerial-Ground Query Aggregation for Cross-View Place Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09418