Without Paired Labeled Data: End-to-End Self-Supervised Learning for Drone-view Geo-Localization

Abstract: Drone-view Geo-Localization (DVGL) aims to achieve accurate localization of drones by retrieving the most relevant GPS-tagged satellite images. However, most existing methods heavily rely on strictly pre-paired drone-satellite images for supervised learning. When the target region shifts, new paired samples are typically required to adapt to the distribution changes. The high cost of annotation and the limited transferability of these methods significantly hinder the practical deployment of DVGL in open-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose an end-to-end self-supervised learning method with a shallow backbone network. It employs a clustering algorithm to generate pseudo-labels and adopts a dual-path contrastive learning framework to learn discriminative intra-view representations. Furthermore, our method incorporates two core modules, including the dynamic hierarchical memory learning module (DHML) and the information consistency evolution learning module (ICEL). The DHML combines short-term and long-term memory to enhance intra-view feature consistency and discriminability. Meanwhile, the ICEL module utilizes a neighborhood-driven dynamic constraint mechanism to systematically capture implicit cross-view semantic correlations, consequently improving cross-view feature alignment. To further stabilize and strengthen the self-supervised training process, a pseudo-label enhancement strategy is introduced to enhance the quality of pseudo supervision. Extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing self-supervised methods and even surpasses several state-of-the-art supervised methods. {Our code is available at https://github.com/ISChenawei/DMNIL.