SDPL: Shifting-Dense Partition Learning for UAV-View Geo-Localization

Cross-view geo-localization aims to match images of the same target from different platforms, e.g., drone and satellite. It is a challenging task due to the changing appearance of targets and environmental content from different views. Most methods focus on obtaining more comprehensive information through feature map segmentation, while inevitably destroying the image structure, and are sensitive to the shifting and scale of the target in the query. To address the above issues, we introduce simple yet effective part-based representation learning, shifting-dense partition learning (SDPL). We propose a dense partition strategy (DPS), dividing the image into multiple parts to explore contextual information while explicitly maintaining the global structure. To handle scenarios with non-centered targets, we further propose the shifting-fusion strategy, which generates multiple sets of parts in parallel based on various segmentation centers, and then adaptively fuses all features to integrate their anti-offset ability. Extensive experiments show that SDPL is robust to position shifting, and performs com-petitively on two prevailing benchmarks, University-1652 and SUES-200. In addition, SDPL shows satisfactory compatibility with a variety of backbone networks (e.g., ResNet and Swin). https://github.com/C-water/SDPL release.