Visual scene matching navigation (VSMN) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) boasts advantages such as high precision, high reliability, and autonomy. The biggest challenge lies in the tension between local fine-grained information and global semantics, as well as limited generalization ability in real-world environments. While existing Transformer-based cross-view geolocation methods enhance global context modeling capabilities, they still generally face issues such as high demands on training data and computational resources, insufficient fusion of local fine-grained information and global semantics, and real-time performance in real-world complex environment. To address these problems, we propose a scene matching and localization algorithm based on the Siamese-ViT. For feature extraction, we use the ViT model to extract global features and K-means clustering to aggregate local features. Combined with the global features extracted by the ViT, a robust local–global feature representation vector is generated. For feature matching, incremental principal component analysis (IPCA) is used to reduce the dimensionality of the high-dimensional feature space, and a KD-tree is constructed for fast feature retrieval to improve matching efficiency. We validated our algorithm on the University-1652 dataset and a dataset of real-world satellite-drone image pairs. The results show that our Siamese-ViT outperforms other models in both Recall and AP. We conduct flight experiments in real-world environments, capturing drone images of complex scenes, including farmland, urban buildings, and waterways. The results show that, at a flight altitude of 350 m, our algorithm achieves an average absolute value of 6.2063 m for latitude, 6.7552 m for longitude, and 10.1922 m for horizontal error. Therefore, our Siamese-ViT demonstrates ideal overall positioning accuracy.
Cheng et al. (Wed,) studied this question.