Cross-view geo-localization between UAV and satellite imagery remains a fundamental yet highly challenging task, especially under large off-nadir views where drastic perspective distortions, occlusions, and appearance gaps occur. Existing benchmarks and methods primarily focus on near-nadir scenarios and often overlook the importance of structural scene understanding and intra-domain relational constraints, limiting their performance in real-world deployments. In this work, we introduce OffNadirLoc, a new benchmark for large off-nadir UAV-to-satellite geo-localization. To tackle the unique challenges posed by off-nadir perspectives, we further propose ONLoc, a framework that incorporates a structure-aware contextual weighting mechanism to dynamically emphasize reliable local features while suppressing ambiguous or repetitive regions. Additionally, we design a view-coherent learning strategy, which treats one satellite image and the corresponding UAV images from multiple views as a cohesive semantic group. This set-level supervision enables the model to learn viewpoint-invariant and discriminative features, making it more effective at capturing multi-view consistency than conventional pairwise contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on the OffNadirLoc benchmark and four near-nadir datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization to unseen datasets without additional training. The code will be released at https://montalario.github.io/offnadirloc/.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-satellite cross-view geo-localization matches UAV images against satellite imagery and has achieved impressive accuracy on clean (non-degraded) image benchmarks. In real-world flights, however, UAV observations are frequently affected by adverse weather, illumination changes, platform motion, sensor noise, and compression, while the robustness of existing methods under such degradations remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we present UAVSat-Deg, a large-scale robustness benchmark for degraded UAV-satellite geo-localization, comprising University-1652-Deg and SUES-200-Deg. UAVSat-Deg covers 27 corruption types, including 19 core and 8 compound corruptions, at three severity levels, supports bidirectional drone-to-satellite and satellite-to-drone retrieval as well as multi-height UAV acquisition, and contains more than 11.7 million pre-generated corrupted test images. Benchmarking representative methods under this protocol reveals substantial robustness gaps, particularly under severe and compound corruptions. To address this problem, we propose ReLATE, a Reliable Evidence Learning framework with Adaptive Token Evidence Regulation, which realizes reliability-adaptive feature fusion during descriptor construction. ReLATE estimates a structure-smoothed reliability field over visual tokens, aggregates trustworthy local evidence, and adaptively integrates it into query-derived representations; the regulated query representations are then combined with the CLS-token and GeM-pooled branches to form the final cross-view descriptor. Across both test sets and retrieval directions, ReLATE achieves the best average corrupted-test performance among the compared methods while maintaining competitive accuracy on clean images. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/JHC626/ReLATE.
Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is fundamental for precise localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments, aiming to match ground or UAV imagery with satellite views. Existing approaches often rely on global feature alignment, but they suffer from substantial domain shifts induced by varying regional textures and weather conditions. This issue becomes even more pronounced in UAV-based scenarios, where the broader perspective inevitably introduces dense, fine-grained objects, creating significant visual clutter. To address this, we draw inspiration from Object-Centric Learning (OCL) and propose InfoGeo, an information-theoretic framework designed to enhance robustness and generalization. InfoGeo reformulates the optimization as an information bottleneck process with two core objectives: (i) maximizing view-invariant information by aligning the object-centric structural relations across views, and (ii) minimizing view-specific noisy signals through cross-view knowledge constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and challenging scenarios demonstrate that InfoGeo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) aims to determine the location of drones in GPS-denied environments by retrieving the corresponding geotagged satellite tile from a reference gallery given UAV observations of a location. In many existing formulations, these observations are represented by a single oblique UAV image. In contrast, our satellite-free setting is designed for multi-view UAV sequences, which are used to construct a geometry-normalized UAV-side location representation before cross-view retrieval. Existing approaches rely on satellite imagery during training, either through paired supervision or unsupervised alignment, which limits practical deployment when satellite data are unavailable or restricted. In this paper, we propose a satellite-free training (SFT) framework that converts drone imagery into cross-view compatible representations through three main stages: drone-side 3D scene reconstruction, geometry-based pseudo-orthophoto generation, and satellite-free feature aggregation for retrieval. Specifically, we first reconstruct dense 3D scenes from multi-view drone images using 3D Gaussian splatting and project the reconstructed geometry into pseudo-orthophotos via PCA-guided orthographic projection. This rendering stage operates directly on reconstructed scene geometry without requiring camera parameters at rendering time. Next, we refine these orthophotos with lightweight geometry-guided inpainting to obtain texture-complete drone-side views. Finally, we extract DINOv3 patch features from the generated orthophotos, learn a Fisher vector aggregation model solely from drone data, and reuse it at test time to encode satellite tiles for cross-view retrieval. Experimental results on University-1652 and SUES-200 show that our SFT framework substantially outperforms satellite-free generalization baselines and narrows the gap to methods trained with satellite imagery.