InfoGeo: Information-Theoretic Object-Centric Learning for Cross-View Generalizable UAV Geo-Localization
This work improves UAV geo-localization for navigation in GPS-denied environments, addressing robustness to varying textures and weather conditions.
InfoGeo tackles cross-view geo-localization in UAV scenarios by using an information-theoretic object-centric learning framework to handle domain shifts and visual clutter. It achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing methods.
Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is fundamental for precise localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments, aiming to match ground or UAV imagery with satellite views. While existing approaches rely on global feature alignment, they often suffer from substantial domain shifts induced by varying regional textures and weather conditions. This issue becomes even more pronounced in UAV-based scenarios, where the broader perspective inevitably introduces dense, fine-grained objects, creating significant visual clutter. To address this, we draw inspiration from Object-Centric Learning (OCL) and propose InfoGeo, an information-theoretic framework designed to enhance robustness and generalization. InfoGeo reformulates the optimization as an information bottleneck process with two core objectives: (i) maximizing view-invariant information by aligning the object-centric structural relations across views, and (ii) minimizing view-specific noisy signals through cross-view knowledge constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and challenging scenarios demonstrate that InfoGeo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.