GeoLink: A 3D-Aware Framework Towards Better Generalization in Cross-View Geo-Localization

arXiv cs.CV / 4/16/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces GeoLink, a 3D-aware framework designed to improve generalization in cross-view geo-localization without GPS supervision in unseen regions and conditions.
  • It addresses semantic inconsistency from viewpoint changes and domain shift by reconstructing scene point clouds offline from multi-view drone images using VGGT to provide stable 3D structural priors.
  • GeoLink enhances 2D representation learning with two modules: a Geometric-aware Semantic Refinement that reduces redundant or view-biased dependencies in 2D features using 3D guidance, and a Unified View Relation Distillation module that transfers 3D structural relations to 2D features.
  • The approach maintains a 2D-only inference pipeline while leveraging 3D anchors during training, and it reports consistent state-of-the-art improvements across multiple benchmarks.
  • Experiments indicate stronger generalization across unseen domains and varying weather environments compared with existing methods.

Abstract

Generalizable cross-view geo-localization aims to match the same location across views in unseen regions and conditions without GPS supervision. Its core difficulty lies in severe semantic inconsistency caused by viewpoint variation and poor generalization under domain shift. Existing methods mainly rely on 2D correspondence, but they are easily distracted by redundant shared information across views, leading to less transferable representations. To address this, we propose GeoLink, a 3D-aware semantic-consistent framework for Generalizable cross-view geo-localization. Specifically, we offline reconstruct scene point clouds from multi-view drone images using VGGT, providing stable structural priors. Based on these 3D anchors, we improve 2D representation learning in two complementary ways. A Geometric-aware Semantic Refinement module mitigates potentially redundant and view-biased dependencies in 2D features under 3D guidance. In addition, a Unified View Relation Distillation module transfers 3D structural relations to 2D features, improving cross-view alignment while preserving a 2D-only inference pipeline. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that GeoLink consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves superior generalization across unseen domains and diverse weather environments.