A Practical Cross-View Image Matching Method between UAV and Satellite for UAV-Based Geo-Localization

Cross-view image matching has attracted extensive attention due to its huge potential applications, such as localization and navigation. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has been developed rapidly in recent years, and people have more opportunities to obtain and use UAV-view images than ever before. However, the algorithms of cross-view image matching between the UAV view (oblique view) and the satellite view (vertical view) are still in their beginning stage, and the matching accuracy is expected to be further improved when applied in real situations. Within this context, in this study, we proposed a cross-view matching method based on location classification (hereinafter referred to LCM), in which the similarity between UAV and satellite views is considered, and we implemented the method with the newest UAV-based geo-localization dataset (University-1652). LCM is able to solve the imbalance of the input sample number between the satellite images and the UAV images. In the training stage, LCM can simplify the retrieval problem into a classification problem and consider the influence of the feature vector size on the matching accuracy. Compared with one study, LCM shows higher accuracies, and Recall@K (K ∈ {1, 5, 10}) and the average precision (AP) were improved by 5–10%. The expansion of satellite-view images and multiple queries proposed by the LCM are capable of improving the matching accuracy during the experiment. In addition, the influences of different feature sizes on the LCM’s accuracy are determined, and we found that 512 is the optimal feature size. Finally, the LCM model trained based on synthetic UAV-view images was evaluated in real-world situations, and the evaluation result shows that it still has satisfactory matching accuracy. The LCM can realize the bidirectional matching between the UAV-view image and the satellite-view image and can contribute to two applications: (i) UAV-view image localization (i.e., predicting the geographic location of UAV-view images based on satellite-view images with geo-tags) and (ii) UAV navigation (i.e., driving the UAV to the region of interest in the satellite-view image based on the flight record).