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.
CVG vs. PCVG
X²Localizer Objective
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 | |||||||
| DeiT★ | DeiT-S | 45M | 2.9 | 26.8 | 61.6 | 74.2 | 89.3 |
| GAReT | DeiT-S | 47M | 6.9 | 50.2 | 83.3 | 90.7 | 96.5 |
| X2Localizer | DeiT-S | 47M | 6.9 | 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 | |||||||
| DeiT★ | DeiT-S | 45M | 2.1 | 23.3 | 54.1 | 67.4 | 84.5 |
| GAReT | DeiT-S | 47M | 5.2 | 41.4 | 75.0 | 84.4 | 93.6 |
| X2Localizer | DeiT-S | 47M | 5.2 | 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 | |||||||
| DeiT★ | DeiT-S | 45M | 1.2 | 16.4 | 42.7 | 56.2 | 75.6 |
| GAReT | DeiT-S | 47M | 4.7 | 25.9 | 55.0 | 66.8 | 82.1 |
| X2Localizer | DeiT-S | 47M | 4.7 | 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 | |||||||
| DeiT★ | DeiT-S | 45M | 1.0 | 12.3 | 35.6 | 48.6 | 67.4 |
| GAReT | DeiT-S | 47M | 4.4 | 16.9 | 40.4 | 52.2 | 69.7 |
| X2Localizer | DeiT-S | 47M | 4.4 | 21.6 | 50.9 | 63.7 | 80.7 |
| Improv. | +4.7 | +10.5 | +11.5 | +11.0 | |||
See the paper for the complete results.
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.
Long-range Geo-localization & System Recovery
PCVG enables (1) long-range geo-localization and (2) re-localization after system failure.
| 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)
@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}
}