MuRDE-FPN: Precise UAV Localization Using Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) require reliable autonomous positioning independent of external satellite navigation signals, motivating the development of a vision-based, end-to-end finding point in map (FPI) framework. This study introduces MuRDE-FPN, an enhanced feature pyramid network (FPN) designed for precise UAV localization, building upon a lightweight one-stream transformer-based (OS-PCPVT) backbone. MuRDE-FPN integrates efficient channel attention (ECA) for adaptive channel recalibration and features two novel components: a multi-receptive deformable enhancement (MuRDE) that utilizes deformable convolutions with varying kernel sizes to refine the semantically rich final feature layer, and a feature alignment module (FAM) for cross-level fusion. Evaluated on the UL14 dataset and a new, more diverse UAV-Sat dataset, MuRDE-FPN consistently outperformed four state-of-the-art FPI methods (FPI, WAMF-FPI, OS-FPI, DCD-FPI). It achieved a relative distance score of 84.26 on UL14 and 63.74 on UAV-Sat datasets, demonstrating improved localization. Ablation studies confirmed the cumulative benefits of ECA, MuRDE, and FAM. These findings highlight the effectiveness of custom FPN designs and targeted feature enhancements for precise cross-view positioning, with MuRDE-FPN providing a robust solution and the UAV-Sat dataset offering a new benchmark for evaluation. Future efforts will address computational efficiency and performance across varying data quality environments.