Understanding road scenes in a geometrically consistent, scene-centric representation is crucial for planning and mapping. We present GOLD-BEV, a framework that learns dense bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic environment maps-including dynamic agents-from ego-centric sensors, using time-synchronized aerial imagery as supervision only during training. BEV-aligned aerial crops provide an intuitive target space, enabling dense semantic annotation with minimal manual effort and avoiding the ambiguity of ego-only BEV labeling. Crucially, strict aerial-ground synchronization allows overhead observations to supervise moving traffic participants and mitigates the temporal inconsistencies inherent to non-synchronized overhead sources. To obtain scalable dense targets, we generate BEV pseudo-labels using domain-adapted aerial teachers, and jointly train BEV segmentation with optional pseudo-aerial BEV reconstruction for interpretability. Finally, we extend beyond aerial coverage by learning to synthesize pseudo-aerial BEV images from ego sensors, which support lightweight human annotation and uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling on unlabeled drives.
@article{arxiv.2604.19411,
title = {GOLD-BEV: GrOund and aeriaL Data for Dense Semantic BEV Mapping of Dynamic Scenes},
author = {Joshua Niemeijer and Alaa Eddine Ben Zekri and Reza Bahmanyar and Philipp M. Schmälzle and Houda Chaabouni-Chouayakh and Franz Kurz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19411},
year = {2026}
}