RadGeoLoc: Radar Geolocalization via Particle Filtering

Abstract

In real-time autonomous field applications, GNSS is often unreliable and inaccurate. A possible solution is localizing against a prebuilt map like a satellite image, as it is georeferenced and already surveyed. In this work, we localize a spinning radar measurement against overhead RGB imagery with a learned observation model. We use a radar representation pretrained by masked reconstruction and align it to features from a satellite image. A particle filter propagated by radar odometry proposes candidate poses, and our observation model provides a likelihood over these poses. We evaluate our method over 31 distinct routes, over 8 datasets spanning both urban and offroad conditions using only ground radar and a coarse local prior. We also examine the robustness over changing weather using repeated traversals over the same route over 13 months, in both urban and offroad conditions.

arXiv commentSubmitted to ICRA 2027