Observation Quality in DSM-Assisted Aerial Localization: A Benchmark and Base-Anchored Uncertainty Calibration

Abstract

Aerial map matching provides position observations for navigation, but a position error alone does not determine how an observation should be weighted. We define five benchmark tasks: position availability and agreement, grouped error structure, predictive uncertainty, controlled updates, and temporal accumulation. We use digital-surface-model-assisted localization to test whether base-anchored uncertainty calibration improves the weighting of unchanged position estimates. The method combines propagated image and map sensitivities with the second moment of a compact configuration subset relative to the reported position. Scale is fitted using separate position references without local surface-height ground truth. Thirteen covariance models are evaluated on two held-out query sets from locations represented in the calibration data. Using reference residuals, we compare the method with a constant full-matrix baseline. With all localization failures included, the method reduces the normalized position-update risk, averaged equally across locations, by 7.70% on 728 conditions and 5.46% on a separate 142 conditions under an independent prior. On the primary set, the equal-location average negative log likelihood on reference residuals improves by 2.571 nat. At these seen locations, exploratory base-only quality calibration and conditional-addition controls leave the incremental update benefit of configuration disagreement unresolved. Navigation benefit and real temporal accumulation remain untested.