  Cross-View Geo-Localisation is still a challenging task where additional
modules, specific pre-processing or zooming strategies are necessary to
determine accurate positions of images. Since different views have different
geometries, pre-processing like polar transformation helps to merge them.
However, this results in distorted images which then have to be rectified.
Adding hard negatives to the training batch could improve the overall
performance but with the default loss functions in geo-localisation it is
difficult to include them. In this article, we present a simplified but
effective architecture based on contrastive learning with symmetric InfoNCE
loss that outperforms current state-of-the-art results. Our framework consists
of a narrow training pipeline that eliminates the need of using aggregation
modules, avoids further pre-processing steps and even increases the
generalisation capability of the model to unknown regions. We introduce two
types of sampling strategies for hard negatives. The first explicitly exploits
geographically neighboring locations to provide a good starting point. The
second leverages the visual similarity between the image embeddings in order to
mine hard negative samples. Our work shows excellent performance on common
cross-view datasets like CVUSA, CVACT, University-1652 and VIGOR. A comparison
between cross-area and same-area settings demonstrate the good generalisation
capability of our model.
