GTR-Loc: Geospatial Text Regularization Assisted Outdoor LiDAR Localization

Abstract

Prevailing scene coordinate regression methods for LiDAR localization suffer from localization ambiguities, as distinct locations can exhibit similar geometric signatures — a challenge that current geometry-based regression approaches have yet to solve. Recent vision–language models show that textual descriptions can enrich scene understanding, supplying potential localization cues missing from point cloud geometries. In this paper, we propose GTR-Loc, a novel text-assisted LiDAR localization framework that effectively generates and integrates geospatial text regularization to enhance localization accuracy. We propose two novel designs: a Geospatial Text Generator that produces discrete pose-aware text descriptions, and a LiDAR-Anchored Text Embedding Refinement module that dynamically constructs view-specific embeddings conditioned on current LiDAR features. The geospatial text embeddings act as regularization to effectively reduce localization ambiguities. Furthermore, we introduce a Modality Reduction Distillation strategy to transfer textual knowledge. It enables high-performance LiDAR-only localization during inference, without requiring runtime text generation. Extensive experiments on challenging large-scale outdoor datasets, including QEOxford, Oxford Radar RobotCar, and NCLT, demonstrate the effectiveness of GTR-Loc. Our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, notably achieving a 9.64%/8.04% improvement in position/orientation accuracy on QEOxford. Our code is available at https://github.com/PSYZ1234/GTR-Loc.