According to one embodiment, a system for determining a position of a vehicle includes an image sensor, a top-down view component, a comparison component, and a location component. The image sensor obtains an image of an environment near a vehicle. The top-down view component is configured to generate a top-down view of a ground surface based on the image of the environment. The comparison component is configured to compare the top-down image with a map, the map comprising a top-down light LIDAR intensity map or a vector-based semantic map. The location component is configured to determine a location of the vehicle on the map based on the comparison.