Learning Ego-Centric BEV Representations from a Perspective-Privileged View: Cross-View Supervision for Online HD Map Construction

Abstract: Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations derived from multi-camera input have become a central interface for online high-definition (HD) map construction. However, most approaches rely solely on ego-centric supervision, requiring large-scale scene structure to be inferred from incomplete observations, occlusions, and diminishing information density at long range, where perspective effects and spatial sparsity hinder consistent structural reasoning. We introduce Cross-View Supervision (CVS), a representation learning paradigm that transfers geometric and topological priors from an ego-aligned overhead perspective into camera-based BEV encoders. Rather than adding auxiliary semantic losses, CVS aligns representations in a shared BEV feature space and distills globally consistent structural knowledge from a perspective-privileged teacher into the ego-centric backbone. This supervision enhances structural coherence without modifying the inference architecture or requiring overhead input at test time. Experiments on nuScenes using ego-aligned aerial imagery from the AID4AD cross-view extension demonstrate consistent improvements over StreamMapNet while maintaining identical camera-only inference. CVS yields +3.9\,mAP in the standard $60\times30\,\mathrm{m}$ region and +9.9\,mAP in the extended $100\times50\,\mathrm{m}$ setting, corresponding to a 44\% relative gain at long range. These results highlight perspective-privileged structural supervision as a promising training principle for improving BEV representation learning in HD map construction.