BEV-Patch-PF: Particle Filtering with BEV-Aerial Feature Matching for Off-Road Geo-Localization

TL;DR

BEV-Patch-PF introduces a GPS-free off-road geo-localization system that combines particle filtering with learned BEV and aerial feature matching, achieving high accuracy and real-time performance in challenging environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel particle filtering approach using learned BEV and aerial features for GPS-free off-road localization, demonstrating significant accuracy improvements.

Findings

9.7x lower ATE on seen routes

6.6x lower ATE on unseen routes

operates in real time at 10 Hz

Abstract

We propose BEV-Patch-PF, a GPS-free sequential geo-localization system that integrates a particle filter with learned bird's-eye-view (BEV) and aerial feature maps. From onboard RGB and depth images, we construct a BEV feature map. For each 3-DoF particle pose hypothesis, we crop the corresponding patch from an aerial feature map computed from a local aerial image queried around the approximate location. BEV-Patch-PF computes a per-particle log-likelihood by matching the BEV feature to the aerial patch feature. On two real-world off-road datasets, our method achieves 9.7x lower absolute trajectory error (ATE) on seen routes and 6.6x lower ATE on unseen routes than a retrieval-based baseline, while maintaining accuracy under dense canopy and shadow. The system runs in real time at 10 Hz on an NVIDIA Tesla T4, enabling practical robot deployment.