APA-BI: Adaptive Partition Aggregation and Bidirectional Integration for UAV-View Geo-Localization

The task of UAV-view geo-localization is to match a query image with database images to estimate the current geographic location of the query image. This is particularly useful in environments where GPS is not available or when the device fails. Although deep learning methods make sufficient progress in UAV-view geo-localization, they still face challenges in improving the distinguishability of features. For instance, some feature aggregation methods do not consider semantic integrity, and robust elements in the image are not given enough attention. This paper proposes a UAV-view geo-localization method (APA-BI) to tackle the above issues. Specifically, we propose an adaptive partition aggregation method to ensure feature integrity at the semantic level by increasing the receptive field of the classifier module. At the same time, we design a bidirectional integration module to further enhance feature distinguishability by extracting robust tubular topological structures from images. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that APA-BI achieves impressive retrieval accuracy and outperforms most state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the test results of APA-BI in real-world scenarios also show excellent performance.