HTGL: UAV Visual Geo-Localization Network with Transformer and Hypergraph Feature Aggregation Enhancement

Satellite signal interruptions disable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation, making visual localization a vital alternative. To improve robustness in oblique flight paths and complex environments, we propose the UAV visual geo-localization network with transformer and hypergraph feature aggregation enhancement (HTGL). First, we enhanced feature extraction capabilities by optimizing the downsampling strategy and attention allocation mechanism in the backbone network. Second, we designed the Hypergraph Feature Aggregation Enhancement (HFAE) module based on hypergraph-based adaptive correlation enhancement (HyperACE) to improve the model’s ability to capture higher-order correlations. Furthermore, we constructed the Complex Scene Rotation dataset (CSR10) and proposed a method for simulating winter scenes, thereby overcoming the limitations of existing research in terms of scenes, flight directions, and seasons. Additionally, two evaluation metrics—pixel distance root mean square error (PD-RMSE) and geographic distance root mean square error (GD-RMSE)—were introduced to enable a comprehensive assessment of algorithm performance. Experimental results show that HTGL achieved RDS scores of 85.95% (+1.4%), 83.64% (+4.1%), and 91.52% (+1.49%) on the UL14, UL14_ROT, and CSR10 datasets, respectively, demonstrating strong robustness in rotated and complex scenes. Actual deployment and flight tests on the Jetson Orin NX platform further validated the model’s excellent engineering practicality.