SatFix: Absolute Visual Localization of UAVs in Satellite Maps from a Single Oblique Image

Jiarui Zeng, Kun Shi, Chiman Vong, Zhedong Zheng

We study absolute metric UAV localization within a provided geo-referenced satellite region, recovering continuous map position and viewing heading from a single oblique image or a short multi-view clip. Existing cross-view geo-localization methods retrieve the most similar satellite tile from a gallery and report Recall@K, but retrieval depends on gallery sampling, provides no heading estimate, and returns a tile index rather than a continuous coordinate. We propose SatFix, a feed-forward UAV--satellite localization framework built on VGGT-$Ω$. Satellite-grid features act as queries that aggregate UAV visual evidence, and two lightweight heads regress a 3-DoF pose in the satellite-map frame: continuous 2D position and heading. SatFix requires no explicit 3D map, rendered bird's-eye image, auxiliary sensor, or test-time pose alignment. A single model supports both single- and multi-view inputs, with trajectory constraints used during multi-view training. For metric evaluation, we introduce University-Metric, where satellite imagery is re-collected over a region up to 10.7$\times$ longer on a side (about 114$\times$ the ground area) than the original University-1652 tiles, with…