Long-range UAV Thermal Geo-localization with Satellite Imagery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel thermal geo-localization framework using satellite RGB imagery for UAVs, addressing the challenge of limited paired thermal and satellite data with domain adaptation, and demonstrates its effectiveness in real-world UAV experiments.

Contribution

It presents the first thermal geo-localization method using satellite RGB imagery for long-range UAV flights, incorporating domain adaptation techniques to handle data scarcity.

Findings

Effective thermal geo-localization in low-illumination environments

Successful application on real UAV-collected data

Release of a new paired satellite-thermal dataset

Abstract

Onboard sensors, such as cameras and thermal sensors, have emerged as effective alternatives to Global Positioning System (GPS) for geo-localization in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. Since GPS can suffer from signal loss and spoofing problems, researchers have explored camera-based techniques such as Visual Geo-localization (VG) using satellite RGB imagery. Additionally, thermal geo-localization (TG) has become crucial for long-range UAV flights in low-illumination environments. This paper proposes a novel thermal geo-localization framework using satellite RGB imagery, which includes multiple domain adaptation methods to address the limited availability of paired thermal and satellite images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in achieving reliable thermal geo-localization performance, even in thermal images with indistinct self-similar features. We evaluate our approach on real data collected onboard a UAV. We also release the code and \textit{Boson-nighttime}, a dataset of paired satellite-thermal and unpaired satellite images for thermal geo-localization with satellite imagery. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to propose a thermal geo-localization method using satellite RGB imagery in long-range flights.