Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2026, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (6): 2072-2080.doi: 10.12305/j.issn.1001-506X.2026.06.27

• Guidance, Navigation and Control • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Diverse features orthogonal constraint-based cross-view geo-localization method for UAVs

Ruihang LIU1, Haiying LIU1,2,*, Yuchen LIU1, Chen CHEN1, Tiexiang LI2,3   

  1. 1. College of Astronautics,Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,Nanjing 211106,China
    2. Nanjing Center for Applied Mathematics,Nanjing 210018,China
    3. School of Mathematics,Southeast University,Nanjing 210096,China
  • Received:2025-03-03 Revised:2025-04-02 Online:2026-06-25 Published:2025-06-10
  • Contact: Haiying LIU

Abstract:

Under limited training data, learning more discriminative features through deep learning remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an adaptive orthogonal constraint neural network based on Transformer. This approach aims to enhance the density of the embedding space by dividing the original space into multiple subspaces, thereby facilitating the learning of deeper features. Based on the concept of orthogonal constraints, a method for overlapping subspace separation is proposed, thereby reducing homogeneous information. Furthermore, the weights between subspaces are dynamically adjusted to optimize the samples that are difficult to train due to similarity. Experiments are conducted on the University-1652 dataset, real word measured data and simulated data under different weather conditions, and the results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper improves the performance in localization and navigation tasks by 29.58%/26.52% (R@1/AP) and 21.51%/27.98% (R@1/AP), respectively, compared with the baseline algorithm. Notwithstanding the constrained training data, the model proposed in this paper learns more robust and discriminative feature representations, facilitating the identification of similar classes and aiding unmanned aerial vehicle in achieving precise localization and navigation.

Key words: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), cross-view geo-localization, visual Transformer, orthogonal constraints, image retrieval

CLC Number: 

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