X2Localizer Logo X²Localizer:
Cross-grained Alignment for
Progressive Cross-view Video Geo-localization

BMVC 2026 ✨Oral
1. University College London   2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology   3. Hunan University
4. University of Alberta   5. Shenzhen University
† Corresponding authors

Abstract

Cross-view Video Geo-localization (CVG) aims to localize ground-view videos by retrieving their corresponding geo-tagged aerial images. However, CVG approaches rely on fixed-length inputs and post-hoc refinement, hindering online-oriented localization under partial or dynamic observations. In this work, we formulate Progressive Cross-view Video Geo-localization (PCVG) as a deployment-oriented extension and evaluation protocol of CVG, enabling localization under varying temporal budgets, prefix-based inference, random-start evaluation, and long-range localization with interruptions. To explore PCVG, we introduce X²Localizer, a cross-grained alignment framework that jointly supervises global prefix-to-aerial retrieval and token-aggregated frame--aerial-tile matching with a budget-dependent asymmetric objective. Furthermore, we introduce a Sliding-Window Re-Localization (SWRL) strategy that dynamically refreshes candidate regions for failure recovery and long-range deployment without full-sequence reprocessing. Extensive experiments show that X²Localizer preserves conventional full-video performance, with marginal gains of +0.1 Recall@1 and +0.3 Recall@10, while substantially improving early localization. In the challenging single-frame setting, X²Localizer improves coarse retrieval by +4.7 Recall@1 and +11.5 Recall@10 over the previous state-of-the-art method. With SWRL, our approach further enables robust progressive localization under random-start and long-distance scenarios, narrowing the gap between benchmark evaluation and real-world deployment.

X2 animation CVG vs. PCVG

Cross-view Video Geo-localization (CVG)

✨ Progressive CVG (PCVG)

X2 animation X²Localizer Objective

X2Localizer architecture
Cross-grained Alignment Objective

X2 animation Coarse Geo-localization (Prefix / Video-to-Global Image)

Model Backbone #params Latency R@1 R@5 R@10 R@1%
Full 40s video-to-global aerial image, τ = 8
DeiTDeiT-S45M2.9 26.861.674.289.3
GAReTDeiT-S47M6.9 50.283.390.796.5
X2Localizer DeiT-S47M6.9 50.3 83.9 91.0 97.7
Improv. +0.1 +0.6 +0.3 +1.2
First 20s clip-to-global aerial image, τ = 4
DeiTDeiT-S45M2.1 23.354.167.484.5
GAReTDeiT-S47M5.2 41.475.084.493.6
X2Localizer DeiT-S47M5.2 42.5 78.2 86.7 95.1
Improv. +1.1 +3.2 +2.3 +1.5
First 5s clip-to-global aerial image, τ = 2
DeiTDeiT-S45M1.2 16.442.756.275.6
GAReTDeiT-S47M4.7 25.955.066.882.1
X2Localizer DeiT-S47M4.7 29.1 61.9 72.8 86.9
Improv. +3.2 +6.9 +6.0 +4.8
First frame-to-global aerial image, τ = 1
DeiTDeiT-S45M1.0 12.335.648.667.4
GAReTDeiT-S47M4.4 16.940.452.269.7
X2Localizer DeiT-S47M4.4 21.6 50.9 63.7 80.7
Improv. +4.7 +10.5 +11.5 +11.0

See the paper for the complete results.

GAReT

1 frame ❌    5s ❌    20s ❌    Full video ✅

✨ X²Localizer

1 frame ✅    5s ✅    20s ✅    Full video ✅

X2 animation Fine-grained Geo-localization (Frame-to-Tile)

Model Backbone #params Latency R@1 R@5 R@10 R@1%
Full 40s video-to-global aerial image, τ = 8
GAReT DeiT-S 45M 3.6 46.8 71.8 81.1 91.4
X2Localizer DeiT-S 45M 3.6 46.5 72.0 81.4 91.8
First 20s clip-to-global aerial image, τ = 4
GAReT DeiT-S 45M 3.6 45.9 68.9 77.0 85.8
   + SWRL 4.9 (/20s) 45.9 67.0 74.0 78.6
X2Localizer DeiT-S 45M 3.6 46.3 70.3 78.8 87.7
   + SWRL 4.9 (/20s) 47.4 70.0 77.3 82.1
First 5s clip-to-global aerial image, τ = 2
GAReT DeiT-S 45M 3.6 39.2 57.6 63.8 70.2
   + SWRL 4.9 (/20s) 44.8 62.5 66.4 67.8
X2Localizer DeiT-S 45M 3.6 41.7 61.5 68.0 74.7
   + SWRL 4.9 (/20s) 48.0 67.3 71.6 72.9
First frame-to-global aerial image, τ = 1
GAReT DeiT-S 45M 3.6 32.1 47.1 51.7 56.6
   + SWRL 4.9 (/20s) 39.2 54.4 56.0 56.0
X2Localizer DeiT-S 45M 3.6 37.5 55.2 60.5 66.3
   + SWRL 4.9 (/20s) 44.9 62.2 64.5 64.5

See the paper for the complete results.

X2 animation Long-range Geo-localization & System Recovery

PCVG enables (1) long-range geo-localization and (2) re-localization after system failure.

Long-range Geo-localization

Long-range geo-localization

Random-start Recovery

Method R@1/5/10/1%
Prefix Coarse Retrieval
GAReT 20.0 / 46.9 / 58.9 / 74.4
X2Localizer 24.5 / 55.0 / 66.9 / 82.3
Incremental Fine-Grained Retrieval
GAReT 35.6 / 51.4 / 56.2 / 61.2
X2Localizer 39.0 / 57.5 / 63.1 / 69.3

(a) Random 1-frame input (τ = 1)

Method R@1/5/10/1%
Prefix Coarse Retrieval
GAReT 29.1 / 60.5 / 71.7 / 84.4
X2Localizer 32.7 / 65.2 / 76.2 / 89.3
Incremental Fine-Grained Retrieval
GAReT 41.5 / 61.0 / 67.6 / 74.5
X2Localizer 43.1 / 64.0 / 70.9 / 78.5

(b) Random 5s clip (τ = 2)

Method R@1/5/10/1%
Prefix Coarse Retrieval
GAReT 36.6 / 70.6 / 79.9 / 90.4
X2Localizer 38.3 / 73.2 / 83.6 / 93.0
Incremental Fine-Grained Retrieval
GAReT 43.9 / 66.2 / 74.1 / 83.1
X2Localizer 44.8 / 68.4 / 76.9 / 86.1

(c) Random 20s clip (τ = 4)

Fine-grained Geo-localization in a Long-range Sample

GAReT

Recall@80m: 15%   Mean offset: >15 km   Median offset: >1 km

✨ X²Localizer

Recall@80m: 79%   Mean offset: 111 m   Median offset: 21 m

X2 animation Acknowledgement

X²Localizer is built upon prior works including GAReT, GAMa, TransGeo, and X-CLIP. We sincerely thank the authors for making their work publicly available.

📃 BibTeX

@article{zeng2026x,
  title={X$^2$Localizer: Cross-grained Alignment for Progressive Cross-view Video Geo-localization}, 
  author={Zeng, Zichao and Fan, Weijia and Chen, Yufan and Goo, June Moh and Zheng, Junwei and Liu, Ruiping and Peng, Kunyu and Zhang, Jiaming and Stiefelhagen, Rainer and Boehm, Jan},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.16658},
  year={2026}
}