Altitude-Adaptive UAV-to-Map Image Matching for Aerial Geo-Localization

arXiv:2602.23872v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Matching downward-looking unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images to georeferenced satellite or aerial map tiles supports map-based geo-localization when direct positioning signals are degraded or unavailable. Variations in UAV altitude change the observed ground footprint and create a scale mismatch between query images and fixed-scale map references. We address this problem with an altitude-adaptive aerial geo-localization framework. The framework estimates relative altitude from a single image using a frequency-domain representation and regression-as-classification. The predicted altitude-class center defines a scale prior that guides query normalization toward the canonical map scale before full-gallery visual place recognition. A footprint-adaptive margin classifier (FAMC) adjusts training margins according to footprint overlap. Experiments on two synthetic and two real-flight datasets show that, at the 100 m localization threshold, altitude adaptation improves average R@1 and R@5 by 50.68 and 47.20 percentage points, respectively, for our visual place recognition module compared with the same retrieval pipeline without altitude normalization. These results show that a relative-altitude-derived scale prior improves cross-altitude UAV-to-map image matching in the evaluated regions and camera settings.