A method, apparatus and system for visual localization includes extracting appearance features of an image, extracting semantic features of the image, fusing the extracted appearance features and semantic features, pooling and projecting the fused features into a semantic embedding space having been trained using fused appearance and semantic features of images having known locations, computing a similarity measure between the projected fused features and embedded, fused appearance and semantic features of images, and predicting a location of the image associated with the projected, fused features. An image can include at least one image from a plurality of modalities such as a Light Detection and Ranging image, a Radio Detection and Ranging image, or a 3D Computer Aided Design modeling image, and an image from a different sensor, such as an RGB image sensor, captured from a same geo-location, which is used to determine the semantic features of the multi-modal image.
Semantically-aware image-based visual localization