Are These From the Same Place? Seeing the Unseen in Cross-View Image Geo-Localization

Royston Rodrigues, Masahiro Tani; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2021, pp. 3753-3761

In an era where digital maps act as gateways to exploring the world, the availability of large scale geo-tagged imagery has inspired a number of visual navigation techniques. One promising approach to visual navigation is cross-view image geo-localization. Here, the images whose location needs to be determined are matched against a database of geo-tagged aerial imagery. The methods based on this approach sought to resolve view point changes. But scenes also vary temporally, during which new landmarks might appear or existing ones might disappear. One cannot guarantee storage of aerial imagery across all time instants and hence a technique robust to temporal variation in scenes becomes of paramount importance. In this paper, we address the temporal gap between scenes by proposing a two step approach. First, we propose a semantically driven data augmentation technique that gives Siamese networks the ability to hallucinate unseen objects. Then we present the augmented samples to a multi-scale attentive embedding network to perform matching tasks. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the integration of the proposed approach with existing frameworks improves top-1 image recall rate on the CVUSA data-set from 89.84 % to 93.09 %, and from 81.03 % to 87.21 % on the CVACT data-set.