DFSA: Dynamic-Feature Collaborative Optimization and Semantic-Alignment Network for UAV Cross-View Geo-Localization

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is a critical technology used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and widely applied in navigation and target localization tasks. However, owing to the extreme perspective disparity between UAV oblique views and satellite vertical views, CVGL still involves significant challenges, including geometric distortion caused by viewpoint differences, drastic appearance inconsistencies, and the difficulty in bridging semantic gaps between heterogeneous data. To address these issues, we propose a novel CVGL method named dynamic-feature collaborative optimization and semantic-alignment network (DFSA), designed to extract robust feature representations and achieve fine-grained alignment. Specifically, the DFSA employs a residual-based vision transformer as the backbone to capture global context while alleviating the training instability and feature collapse often associated with standard transformers. To bridge the semantic gap between global and local features, we design a feature optimization module comprising a local feature enhancer and a global feature aggregator. This module establishes a closed-loop collaborative system that facilitates top-down semantic guidance and bottom-up detail feedback. Furthermore, we introduce a semantic segmentation and alignment module that adaptively partitions images into semantic regions based on feature response distributions, shifting the matching granularity from the global level to the semantic region level to effectively overcome feature mismatches caused by positional offsets and scale variations. Extensive experiments conducted on the University-1652 and SUES-200 datasets demonstrate the superior image retrieval performance of the proposed DFSA. Specifically, DFSA achieves a Recall@1 of 94.87% and an Average Precision (AP) of 95.32% on the University-1652 dataset and maintains highly competitive Recall@1 performances between 96.83% and 99.25% across various altitudes on the SUES-200 dataset. These results validate the model’s effectiveness in handling extreme viewpoint changes for UAV-based cross-view image retrieval tasks.