Leveraging Multi-View Images to Learn Domain-Invariant Discriminative Embeddings for Cross-View Geo-Localization
Ziyi Chen, Tingyu Li, Dilong Li, Jin Gou, Cheng Wang, Kyle Gao, Jonathan Li, Zheng Gong · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology · 2025
Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) aims to match images of the same location captured from different viewpoints, such as those captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and satellite platforms. The task is particularly challenging due to significant variations in scale, viewpoint, and illumination. Most existing methods employ symmetric sampling strategy to construct drone–satellite image pairs for deep metric learning, but neglect the potential of incorporating multi-view drone images to enhance the viewpoint robustness of features. To address this, we propose leveraging multi-view images to learn Domain-Invariant Discriminative Embeddings (DIDE) for CVGL. DIDE introduces an Inter-view Feature Aggregation Module (IFAM), which dynamically integrates multi-view drone information into robust embeddings. These are used in contrastive learning with satellite embeddings within batches to learn view-invariant discriminative features, while representation learning further improves scene discrimination across batches. To reduce the domain gap, DIDE constructs and aligns drone and satellite prototypes for effective cross-domain feature alignment. Furthermore, we adopt a parameter-efficient transfer learning strategy that leverages the capabilities of pre-trained foundation models while fine-tuning only dual adapters, significantly reducing the trainable parameters. DIDE achieves the state-of-the-art on University-1652 and University-160k, competitive results on SUES-200, and demonstrates strong cross-dataset transferability, with fewer training parameters and lower computational cost.