Warp-free Cross-view Geo-localization via Feature-space Consensus Mining

Abstract

Cross-view geo-localization is challenging due to drastic viewpoint changes and large appearance discrepancies between street-level and satellite imagery. Although existing methods often use geometric warping to expose co-visible cues, such transformations rely on restrictive spatial assumptions and inevitably introduce severe visual distortions under view-dependent visibility, yielding noisy supervision and fragile correspondences. To overcome this, we propose a novel joint-view consensus-guided learning framework that entirely bypasses explicit geometric warping. Instead of forcing rigid spatial alignment, we dynamically mine and adaptively strengthen a semantic consensus directly within the feature space. Specifically, an auxiliary joint-view pathway during training enables direct cross-view interaction, allowing each view to selectively aggregate corroborative evidence into a unified consensus representation. To resolve feature heterogeneity among the single- and joint-view streams, we introduce global pattern probes acting as a semantic dictionary to project divergent modalities into a strictly aligned metric space. Guided by a consensus-mediated contrastive objective, single-view embeddings are explicitly pulled toward the joint-view anchor during training, distilling this consensus-mining capability into the single-view encoders for robust retrieval at inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across four standard benchmarks, underscoring the importance of discovering cross-view semantic consensus for reliable geo-localization.