A Self-Adaptive Feature Extraction Method for Aerial-view Geo-localization

Cross-view geo-localization aims to match the same geographic location from different view images, e.g., drone-view images and geo-referenced satellite-view images. Due to UAV cameras' different shooting angles and heights, the scale of the same captured target building in the drone-view images varies greatly. Meanwhile, there is a difference in size and floor area for different geographic locations in the real world, such as towers and stadiums, which also leads to scale variants of geographic targets in the images. However, existing methods mainly focus on extracting the fine-grained information of the geographic targets or the contextual information of the surrounding area, which overlook the robust feature for scale changes and the importance of feature alignment. In this study, we argue that the key underpinning of this task is to train a network to mine a discriminative representation against scale variants. To this end, we design an effective and novel end-to-end network called Self-Adaptive Feature Extraction Network (Safe-Net) to extract powerful scale-invariant features in a self-adaptive manner. Safe-Net includes a global representation-guided feature alignment module and a saliency-guided feature partition module. The former applies an affine transformation guided by the global feature for adaptive feature alignment. Without extra region annotations, the latter computes saliency distribution for different regions of the image and adopts the saliency information to guide a self-adaptive feature partition on the feature map to learn a visual representation against scale variants. Experiments on two prevailing large-scale aerial-view geo-localization benchmarks, i.e., University-1652 and SUES-200, show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results. In addition, our proposed Safe-Net has a significant scale adaptive capability and can extract robust feature representations for those query images with small target buildings. The source code of this study is available at: https://github.com/AggMan96/Safe-Net.