Edge-Assisted Multi-View Localization for Low-Altitude Economy under GPS-Challenged Environments

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) serving the low-altitude economy require reliable localization in urban canyons, indoor facilities, and other GPS-challenged environments. Visual matching with a geo-tagged database provides an alternative source for absolute positioning, but onboard computation and energy limits motivate offloading the database and matching pipeline to an edge server. The resulting localization quality depends on what visual information can reach the edge in time under varying wireless-communication and edge-computing resources. In this paper, we propose a network-adaptive edge-assisted multi-view localization framework that combines scalable orthogonality-regularized variational information bottleneck (O-VIB) encoding, value-of-information (VOI)-guided request control, and value-aware edge scheduling. We design an O-VIB model that supports nested latent prefixes from 8 to 128 dimensions and four UAV view modes. Each UAV requests edge assistance when the predicted localization-risk reduction exceeds the communication and service costs. On CARLA multi-view UAV data, VOI-guided control can lower the mean and 95th-percentile (p95) route errors by 24.8% and 31.0%, respectively, relative to budgeted periodic offloading under a matched per-route traffic budget. In indoor UAV experiments with motion-capture ground truth, our design can lower the mean position error by 28.0% relative to uncompressed all-view CLIP retrieval while cutting the descriptor traffic by 98.6%, using a 0.145 KB semantic representation. Under high congestion, a VOI-weighted scheduler with waiting-age and deadline shaping can lower the edge-side p95 latency of the top-10% high-value requests from 137.7 ms to 32.8 ms.