[2603.22153] Beyond Matching to Tiles: Bridging Unaligned Aerial and Satellite Views for Vision-Only UAV Navigation

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition arXiv:2603.22153 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Mar 2026] Title:Beyond Matching to Tiles: Bridging Unaligned Aerial and Satellite Views for Vision-Only UAV Navigation Authors:Kejia Liu, Haoyang Zhou, Ruoyu Xu, Peicheng Wang, Mingli Song, Haofei Zhang View a PDF of the paper titled Beyond Matching to Tiles: Bridging Unaligned Aerial and Satellite Views for Vision-Only UAV Navigation, by Kejia Liu and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Recent advances in cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) methods have shown strong potential for supporting unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in GNSS-denied environments. However, existing work predominantly focuses on matching UAV views to onboard map tiles, which introduces an inherent trade-off between accuracy and storage overhead, and overlooks the importance of the UAV's heading during navigation. Moreover, the substantial discrepancies and varying overlaps in cross-view scenarios have been insufficiently considered, limiting their generalization to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present Bearing-UAV, a purely vision-driven cross-view navigation method that jointly predicts UAV absolute location and heading from neighboring features, enabling accurate, lightweight, and robust navigation in the wild. Our method leverages global and local structural features and explicitly encodes relative spatial relationships, making it robust to cross-view variations, misal...