Top2Ground: A Height-Aware Dual Conditioning Diffusion Model for Robust Aerial-to-Ground View Generation

Jae Joong Lee; Bedrich Benes

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arXiv · 2511.08258

Top2Ground: A Height-Aware Dual Conditioning Diffusion Model for Robust Aerial-to-Ground View Generation

Jae Joong Lee·Bedrich Benes

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Abstract

Generating ground-level images from aerial views is a challenging task due to extreme viewpoint disparity, occlusions, and a limited field of view. We introduce Top2Ground, a novel diffusion-based method that directly generates photorealistic ground-view images from aerial input images without relying on intermediate representations such as depth maps or 3D voxels. Specifically, we condition the denoising process on a joint representation of VAE-encoded spatial features (derived from aerial RGB images and an estimated height map) and CLIP-based semantic embeddings. This design ensures the generation is both geometrically constrained by the scene's 3D structure and semantically consistent with its content. We evaluate Top2Ground on three diverse datasets: CVUSA, CVACT, and the Auto Arborist. Our approach shows 7.3% average improvement in SSIM across three benchmark datasets, showing Top2Ground can robustly handle both wide and narrow fields of view, highlighting its strong generalization capabilities.

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BibTeX RIS

Jae Joong Lee, Bedrich Benes. 2025-11-11. Top2Ground: A Height-Aware Dual Conditioning Diffusion Model for Robust Aerial-to-Ground View Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08258

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