UAV’s Status Is Worth Considering: A Fusion Representations Matching Method for Geo-Localization

Visual geo-localization plays a crucial role in positioning and navigation for unmanned aerial vehicles, whose goal is to match the same geographic target from different views. This is a challenging task due to the drastic variations in different viewpoints and appearances. Previous methods have been focused on mining features inside the images. However, they underestimated the influence of external elements and the interaction of various representations. Inspired by multimodal and bilinear pooling, we proposed a pioneering feature fusion network (MBF) to address these inherent differences between drone and satellite views. We observe that UAV’s status, such as flight height, leads to changes in the size of image field of view. In addition, local parts of the target scene act a role of importance in extracting discriminative features. Therefore, we present two approaches to exploit those priors. The first module is to add status information to network by transforming them into word embeddings. Note that they concatenate with image embeddings in Transformer block to learn status-aware features. Then, global and local part feature maps from the same viewpoint are correlated and reinforced by hierarchical bilinear pooling (HBP) to improve the robustness of feature representation. By the above approaches, we achieve more discriminative deep representations facilitating the geo-localization more effectively. Our experiments on existing benchmark datasets show significant performance boosting, reaching the new state-of-the-art result. Remarkably, the recall@1 accuracy achieves 89.05% in drone localization task and 93.15% in drone navigation task in University-1652, and shows strong robustness at different flight heights in the SUES-200 dataset.