Cross-view image geo-localization

Abstract

CNN-based methods for cross-view image geo-localization rely on polar transform and fail to model global correlation. A pure transformer-based approach (TransGeo) is described to address these limitations from a different perspective. TransGeo takes full advantage of the strengths of the transformer related to global information modeling and explicit position information encoding. The claimed invention further leverages transformer input's flexibility and discloses an attention-guided non-uniform cropping method so that uninformative image patches are removed with a negligible drop in performance to reduce computation cost. The saved computation can be reallocated to increase resolution only for informative patches, resulting in performance improvement with no additional computation cost. This 'attend and zoom-in' strategy is highly similar to human behavior when observing images. Remarkably, TransGeo achieves state-of-the-art results on both urban and rural datasets, with significantly less computation cost than CNN-based methods. It does not rely on polar transform and provides faster methods.