SkyLink: A Large Vision-Language Model Driven Re-ranking Framework for Cross-View UAV geolocalization

TL;DR

SkyLink introduces a novel framework utilizing a large vision-language model to jointly model cross-view relationships, significantly improving UAV geolocalization accuracy in large-scale image retrieval tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents SkyLink, a plug-and-play ranking framework that models inter-view relationships with a vision-language model and a relational-aware loss, advancing cross-view UAV geolocalization.

Findings

SkyLink significantly improves ranking performance across multiple datasets.

The relational-aware loss enhances training stability and discriminative ability.

Extensive experiments show consistent superiority over existing methods.

Abstract

Cross-view UAV geolocalization is fundamentally a challenging large-scale image retrieval task, aiming to determine the geographic coordinates of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) queries by matching them against an extensive geo-tagged satellite image database. Most existing methods learn separate feature representations for each view and determine the final prediction using naive heuristics to assess feature similarity, thereby neglecting to model the crucial cross-view relationships. In this paper, we propose SkyLink, a novel plug-and-play ranking framework that pioneers joint relational modeling of inter-view relationships to enhance cross-view UAV geolocalization. SkyLink leverages a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) to model the intricate visual-semantic relationships between UAV and satellite views, facilitating effective cross-view matching. To further refine the learning process, we introduce a relational-aware loss. It leverages soft labels to provide a more nuanced supervision signal, mitigating the harsh penalty on near-positive pairs. This approach enhances both training stability and the model's discriminative capacity. Extensive experiments conducted across multiple base retrieval architectures and benchmark datasets demonstrate that SkyLink significantly boosts the ranking effectiveness of existing models, consistently achieving superior performance in various challenging scenarios.