Visual geo-localization for drones faces critical degradation under weather perturbations, \eg, rain and fog, where existing methods struggle with two inherent limitations: 1) Heavy reliance on limited weather categories that constrain generalization, and 2) Suboptimal disentanglement of entangled scene-weather features through pseudo weather categories. We present WeatherPrompt, a multi-modality learning paradigm that establishes weather-invariant representations through fusing the image embedding with the text context. Our framework introduces two key contributions: First, a Training-free Weather Reasoning mechanism that employs off-the-shelf large multi-modality models to synthesize multi-weather textual descriptions through human-like reasoning. It improves the scalability to unseen or complex weather, and could reflect different weather strength. Second, to better disentangle the scene and weather feature, we propose a multi-modality framework with the dynamic gating mechanism driven by the text embedding to adaptively reweight and fuse visual features across modalities. The framework is further optimized by the cross-modal objectives, including image-text contrastive learning and image-text matching, which maps the same scene with different weather conditions closer in the respresentation space. Extensive experiments validate that, under diverse weather conditions, our method achieves competitive recall rates compared to state-of-the-art drone geo-localization methods. Notably, it improves Recall@1 by +13.37\% under night conditions and by 18.69\% under fog and snow conditions.

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) between drone and satellite imagery remains challenging due to severe viewpoint gaps and the presence of hard negatives, which are visually similar but geographically mismatched samples. Existing mining or reweighting strategies often use static weighting, which is sensitive to distribution shifts and prone to overemphasizing difficult samples too early, leading to noisy gradients and unstable convergence. In this paper, we present a Dual-level Progressive Hardness-aware Reweighting (DPHR) strategy. At the sample level, a Ratio-based Difficulty-Aware (RDA) module evaluates relative difficulty and assigns fine-grained weights to negatives. At the batch level, a Progressive Adaptive Loss Weighting (PALW) mechanism exploits a training-progress signal to attenuate noisy gradients during early optimization and progressively enhance hard-negative mining as training matures. Experiments on the University-1652 and SUES-200 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed DPHR, achieving consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Worldwide geo-localization involves determining the exact geographic location of images captured globally, typically guided by geographic cues such as climate, landmarks, and architectural styles. Despite advancements in geo-localization models like GeoCLIP, which leverages images and location alignment via contrastive learning for accurate predictions, the interpretability of these models remains insufficiently explored. Current concept-based interpretability methods fail to align effectively with Geo-alignment image-location embedding objectives, resulting in suboptimal inter-pretability and performance. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework integrating global geo-localization with concept bottlenecks. Our method inserts a Concept-A ware Alignment Module that jointly projects image and location embeddings onto a shared bank of geographic concepts (e.g., tropical climate, mountain, cathedral) and minimizes a concept-level loss, enhancing alignment in a concept-specific subspace and enabling robust interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce interpretability into geo-localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses GeoCLIP in geo-localization accuracy and boosts performance across diverse geospatial prediction tasks, revealing richer semantic insights into geographic decision-making processes.

Geo-localization is an essential component of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation systems to ensure precise absolute self-localization in outdoor environments. To address the challenges of GPS signal interruptions or low illumination, Thermal Geo-localization (TG) employs aerial thermal imagery to align with reference satellite maps to accurately determine the UAV's location. However, existing TG methods lack uncertainty measurement in their outputs, compromising system robustness in the presence of textureless or corrupted thermal images, self-similar or outdated satellite maps, geometric noises, or thermal images exceeding satellite maps. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents \textit{UASTHN}, a novel approach for Uncertainty Estimation (UE) in Deep Homography Estimation (DHE) tasks for TG applications. Specifically, we introduce a novel Crop-based Test-Time Augmentation (CropTTA) strategy, which leverages the homography consensus of cropped image views to effectively measure data uncertainty. This approach is complemented by Deep Ensembles (DE) employed for model uncertainty, offering comparable performance with improved efficiency and seamless integration with any DHE model. Extensive experiments across multiple DHE models demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CropTTA in TG applications. Analysis of detected failure cases underscores the improved reliability of CropTTA under challenging conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the capability of combining CropTTA and DE for a comprehensive assessment of both data and model uncertainty. Our research provides profound insights into the broader intersection of localization and uncertainty estimation. The code and data is publicly available.

Cross-view geo-localization in GNSS-denied environments aims to determine an unknown location by matching drone-view images with the correct geo-tagged satellite-view images from a large gallery. Recent research shows that learning discriminative image representations under specific weather conditions can significantly enhance performance. However, the frequent occurrence of unseen extreme weather conditions hinders progress. This paper introduces MCGF, a Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Framework designed to dynamically adapt to unseen weather conditions. MCGF establishes a joint optimization between image restoration and geo-localization using denoising diffusion models. For image restoration, MCGF incorporates a shared encoder and a lightweight restoration module to help the backbone eliminate weather-specific information. For geo-localization, MCGF uses EVA-02 as a backbone for feature extraction, with cross-entropy loss for training and cosine distance for testing. Extensive experiments on University160k-WX demonstrate that MCGF achieves competitive results for geo-localization in varying weather conditions.

Visual geo-localization demands in-depth knowledge and advanced reasoning skills to associate images with real-world geographic locations precisely. In general, traditional methods based on data-matching are hindered by the impracticality of storing adequate visual records of global landmarks. Recently, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated the capability of geo-localization through Visual Question Answering (VQA), enabling a solution that does not require external geo-tagged image records. However, the performance of a single LVLM is still limited by its intrinsic knowledge and reasoning capabilities. Along this line, in this paper, we introduce a novel visual geo-localization framework called \name\ that integrates the inherent knowledge of multiple LVLM agents via inter-agent communication to achieve effective geo-localization of images. Furthermore, our framework employs a dynamic learning strategy to optimize the communication patterns among agents, reducing unnecessary discussions among agents and improving the efficiency of the framework. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we construct GeoGlobe, a novel dataset for visual geo-localization tasks. Extensive testing on the dataset demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Algorithms process this data to pinpoint exact coordinates[11][12]. Geo-localization is important for organizing and analyzing large volumes of imagery data, as demonstrated by systems like the US Geological Survey (USGS), which classify and locate satellite and drone images to streamline data collection and analysis. Social media platforms like Instagram use geo-localization to tag photos with specific locations, enabling users to explore location-based content[11]. Despite its significance, many images and videos lack geo-localization data, particularly those collected in the past or by devices without GPS capabilities[12].

This work tackles the problem of geo-localization with a new paradigm using a large vision-language model (LVLM) augmented with human inference knowledge. A primary challenge here is the scarcity of data for training the LVLM - existing street-view datasets often contain numerous low-quality images lacking visual clues, and lack any reasoning inference. To address the data-quality issue, we devise a CLIP-based network to quantify the degree of street-view images being locatable, leading to the creation of a new dataset comprising highly locatable street views. To enhance reasoning inference, we integrate external knowledge obtained from real geo-localization games, tapping into valuable human inference capabilities. The data are utilized to train GeoReasoner, which undergoes fine-tuning through dedicated reasoning and location-tuning stages. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations illustrate that GeoReasoner outperforms counterpart LVLMs by more than 25% at country-level and 38% at city-level geo-localization tasks, and surpasses StreetCLIP performance while requiring fewer training resources. The data and code are available at https://github.com/lingli1996/GeoReasoner.

Cross-view image matching for geo-localisation is a challenging problem due to the significant visual difference between aerial and ground-level viewpoints. The method provides localisation capabilities from geo-referenced images, eliminating the need for external devices or costly equipment. This enhances the capacity of agents to autonomously determine their position, navigate, and operate effectively in environments where GPS signals are unavailable. Current research employs a variety of techniques to reduce the domain gap such as applying polar transforms to aerial images or synthesising between perspectives. However, these approaches generally rely on having a 360{\deg} field of view, limiting real-world feasibility. We propose BEV-CV, an approach which introduces two key novelties. Firstly we bring ground-level images into a semantic Birds-Eye-View before matching embeddings, allowing for direct comparison with aerial segmentation representations. Secondly, we introduce the use of a Normalised Temperature-scaled Cross Entropy Loss to the sub-field, achieving faster convergence than with the standard triplet loss. BEV-CV achieves state-of-the-art recall accuracies, improving feature extraction Top-1 rates by more than 300%, and Top-1% rates by approximately 150% for 70{\deg} crops, and for orientation-aware application we achieve a 35% Top-1 accuracy increase with 70{\deg} crops.