A Faster and More Effective Cross-View Matching Method of UAV and Satellite Images for UAV Geolocalization

Cross-view geolocalization matches the same target in different images from various views, such as views of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites, which is a key technology for UAVs to autonomously locate and navigate without a positioning system (e.g., GPS and GNSS). The most challenging a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiedong Zhuang, Ming Dai, Xuruoyan Chen, Enhui Zheng
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2021-10-01
Series:Remote Sensing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/19/3979
Description
Summary:Cross-view geolocalization matches the same target in different images from various views, such as views of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites, which is a key technology for UAVs to autonomously locate and navigate without a positioning system (e.g., GPS and GNSS). The most challenging aspect in this area is the shifting of targets and nonuniform scales among different views. Published methods focus on extracting coarse features from parts of images, but neglect the relationship between different views, and the influence of scale and shifting. To bridge this gap, an effective network is proposed with well-designed structures, referred to as multiscale block attention (MSBA), based on a local pattern network. MSBA cuts images into several parts with different scales, among which self-attention is applied to make feature extraction more efficient. The features of different views are extracted by a multibranch structure, which was designed to make different branches learn from each other, leading to a more subtle relationship between views. The method was implemented with the newest UAV-based geolocalization dataset. Compared with the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, MSBA accuracy improved by almost 10% when the inference time was equal to that of the SOTA method; when the accuracy of MSBA was the same as that of the SOTA method, inference time was shortened by 30%.
ISSN:2072-4292