A cross-view geo-localization method guided by relation-aware global attention

Cross-view geo-localization mainly exploits query images to match images from the same geographical location from different platforms. Most existing methods fail to adequately consider the effect of image structural information on cross-view geo-localization, resulting in the extracted features can not fully characterize the image, which affects the localization accuracy. Based on this, this paper proposes a cross-view geo-localization method guided by relation-aware global attention, which can capture the rich global structural information by perfectly integrating attention mechanism and feature extraction network, thus improving the representation ability of features. Meanwhile, considering the important role of semantic and context information in geo-localization, a joint training structure with parallel global branch and local branch is designed to fully mine multi-scale context features for image matching, which can further improve the accuracy of cross-view geo-localization. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results on University-1652, CVUSA, and CVACT datasets show that the algorithm in this paper outperforms other advanced methods in recall accuracy (Recall) and image retrieval average precision (AP).