# A Transformer-Based Feature Segmentation and Region Alignment Method For UAV-View Geo-Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09206 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09206/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [Mobile-Former: Bridging MobileNet and Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05895/) (2021)
- [VIGOR: Cross-View Image Geo-localization beyond One-to-one Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12172/) (2020)
- [Lending Orientation to Neural Networks for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12351/) (2019)
- [Image-Image Domain Adaptation with Preserved Self-Similarity and Domain-Dissimilarity for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07027/) (2017)
- [Conformer: Local Features Coupling Global Representations for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03889/) (2021)
- [TransGAN: Two Pure Transformers Can Make One Strong GAN, and That Can Scale Up](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07074/) (2021)
- [University-1652: A Multi-view Multi-source Benchmark for Drone-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12186/) (2020)
- [Dual-Path Convolutional Image-Text Embeddings with Instance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05535/) (2017)
- [Invariance Matters: Exemplar Memory for Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01990/) (2019)
- [Each Part Matters: Local Patterns Facilitate Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11646/) (2020)
- [Predicting Ground-Level Scene Layout from Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02709/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Transformer with Multi-View Visual Representation for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07841/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [SUES-200: A Multi-height Multi-scene Cross-view Image Benchmark Across Drone and Satellite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10704/) (2022)
- [Towards Natural Language-Guided Drones: GeoText-1652 Benchmark with Spatial Relation Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12751/) (2023)
- [Multiple-environment Self-adaptive Network for Aerial-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08381/) (2022)
- [SDPL: Shifting-Dense Partition Learning for UAV-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04172/) (2024)
- [CV-Cities: Advancing Cross-View Geo-Localization in Global Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12431/) (2024)
- [PARFormer: Transformer-based Multi-Task Network for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07230/) (2023)
- [Learning Cross-view Visual Geo-localization without Ground Truth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12702/) (2024)
- [Learning Cross-view Geo-localization Embeddings via Dynamic Weighted Decorrelation Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05296/) (2022)
- [Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13610/) (2024)
- [Multi-Level Embedding and Alignment Network with Consistency and Invariance Learning for Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14819/) (2024)
- [Orientation-Guided Contrastive Learning for UAV-View Geo-Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00982/) (2023)
- [WeatherPrompt: Multi-modality Representation Learning for All-Weather Drone Visual Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09560/) (2025)
- [Cross-View Image Set Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18852/) (2024)
- [LoD-Loc v2: Aerial Visual Localization over Low Level-of-Detail City Models using Explicit Silhouette Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00659/) (2025)
- [Visual place recognition for aerial imagery: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00885/) (2024)
- [Scale-adaptive UAV Geo-localization via Height-aware Partition Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11535/) (2024)
- [A Transformer-Based Adaptive Semantic Aggregation Method for UAV Visual Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01574/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Transformer and Large Language Models for UAV Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11834/) (2025)
- [Object-aware graph matching network for cross-domain remote sensing image localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02489/) (2025)
- [UniABG: Unified Adversarial View Bridging and Graph Correspondence for Unsupervised Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12054/) (2025)
- [Precise GPS-Denied UAV Self-Positioning via Context-Enhanced Cross-View Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11408/) (2025)
- [Robust Drone-View Geo-Localization via Content-Viewpoint Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11822/) (2025)
- [Agentic Satellite-Augmented Low-Altitude Economy and Terrestrial Networks: A Survey on Generative Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14633/) (2025)
- [JRN-Geo: A Joint Perception Network based on RGB and Normal images for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05696/) (2025)
- [DiffusionUavLoc: Visually Prompted Diffusion for Cross-View UAV Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06422/) (2025)
- [SCC-Loc: A Unified Semantic Cascade Consensus Framework for UAV Thermal Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03120/) (2026)
- [Drone Referring Localization: An Efficient Heterogeneous Spatial Feature Interaction Method For UAV Self-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06561/) (2022)
- [View Distribution Alignment with Progressive Adversarial Learning for UAV Visual Geo-Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01573/) (2024)
- [Angle Robustness Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation in GNSS-Denied Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02405/) (2024)
- [Style Alignment based Dynamic Observation Method for UAV-View Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02832/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-view geo-localization is a task of matching the same geographic image from different views, e.g., unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and satellite. The most difficult challenges are the position shift and the uncertainty of distance and scale. Existing methods are mainly aimed at digging for more comprehensive fine-grained information. However, it underestimates the importance of extracting robust feature representation and the impact of feature alignment. The CNN-based methods have achieved great success in cross-view geo-localization. However it still has some limitations, e.g., it can only extract part of the information in the neighborhood and some scale reduction operations will make some fine-grained information lost. In particular, we introduce a simple and efficient transformer-based structure called Feature Segmentation and Region Alignment (FSRA) to enhance the model's ability to understand contextual information as well as to understand the distribution of instances. Without using additional supervisory information, FSRA divides regions based on the heat distribution of the transformer's feature map, and then aligns multiple specific regions in different views one on one. Finally, FSRA integrates each region into a set of feature representations. The difference is that FSRA does not divide regions manually, but automatically based on the heat distribution of the feature map. So that specific instances can still be divided and aligned when there are significant shifts and scale changes in the image. In addition, a multiple sampling strategy is proposed to overcome the disparity in the number of satellite images and that of images from other sources. Experiments show that the proposed method has superior performance and achieves the state-of-the-art in both tasks of drone view target localization and drone navigation. Code will be released at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/FSRA