Satellite-Free Training for Drone-View Geo-Localization

Drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) typically assumes access to satellite imagery during task-specific development. We study a late-arriving-gallery setting, where model development relies only on grouped source UAV observations and the target satellite gallery remains unavailable until the model is frozen. We propose, Orbit Completion Learning, which uses source-side multi-view geometry as privileged training information while preserving image-only deployment. OCL reconstructs each source scene using structure-from-motion and 3D Gaussian Splatting, and renders canonical complementary views to complete its observation orbit. An exponential-moving-average teacher aggregates the completed orbit into a scene-level target, while a variable-cardinality student learns to recover this target from partial observations through distillation and contrastive learning. At inference, the frozen student independently encodes UAV queries and satellite gallery images using the same single-image path, without reconstruction or target-gallery adaptation. Experiments on University-1652, SUES-200, and IRVL328, together with nine weather-style appearance shifts, evaluate generalization across altitude, modality, and appearance variations. OCL achieves 57.85% R@1 and 68.44% mAP on University-1652, and obtains the best R@1 among the evaluated target-satellite-free methods in eight of nine weather conditions. Controlled ablations further show that completed teacher context provides gains beyond student-side synthetic-view augmentation. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/liutao23/OCL-DVGL.