  We study an important, yet largely unexplored problem of large-scale
cross-modal visual localization by matching ground RGB images to a
geo-referenced aerial LIDAR 3D point cloud (rendered as depth images). Prior
works were demonstrated on small datasets and did not lend themselves to
scaling up for large-scale applications. To enable large-scale evaluation, we
introduce a new dataset containing over 550K pairs (covering 143 km^2 area) of
RGB and aerial LIDAR depth images. We propose a novel joint embedding based
method that effectively combines the appearance and semantic cues from both
modalities to handle drastic cross-modal variations. Experiments on the
proposed dataset show that our model achieves a strong result of a median rank
of 5 in matching across a large test set of 50K location pairs collected from a
14km^2 area. This represents a significant advancement over prior works in
performance and scale. We conclude with qualitative results to highlight the
challenging nature of this task and the benefits of the proposed model. Our
work provides a foundation for further research in cross-modal visual
localization.
