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Main Authors: Zhong, Jiageng, Zhou, Qi, Li, Ming, Gruen, Armin, Liao, Xuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04513
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author Zhong, Jiageng
Zhou, Qi
Li, Ming
Gruen, Armin
Liao, Xuan
author_facet Zhong, Jiageng
Zhou, Qi
Li, Ming
Gruen, Armin
Liao, Xuan
contents Low-overlap aerial imagery poses significant challenges to traditional photogrammetric methods, which rely heavily on high image overlap to produce accurate and complete mapping products. In this study, we propose a novel workflow based on monocular depth estimation to address the limitations of conventional techniques. Our method leverages tie points obtained from aerial triangulation to establish a relationship between monocular depth and metric depth, thus transforming the original depth map into a metric depth map, enabling the generation of dense depth information and the comprehensive reconstruction of the scene. For the experiments, a high-overlap drone dataset containing 296 images is processed using Metashape to generate depth maps and DSMs as ground truth. Subsequently, we create a low-overlap dataset by selecting 20 images for experimental evaluation. Results demonstrate that while the recovered depth maps and resulting DSMs achieve meter-level accuracy, they provide significantly better completeness compared to traditional methods, particularly in regions covered by single images. This study showcases the potential of monocular depth estimation in low-overlap aerial photogrammetry.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04513
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Novel Solution for Drone Photogrammetry with Low-overlap Aerial Images using Monocular Depth Estimation
Zhong, Jiageng
Zhou, Qi
Li, Ming
Gruen, Armin
Liao, Xuan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Low-overlap aerial imagery poses significant challenges to traditional photogrammetric methods, which rely heavily on high image overlap to produce accurate and complete mapping products. In this study, we propose a novel workflow based on monocular depth estimation to address the limitations of conventional techniques. Our method leverages tie points obtained from aerial triangulation to establish a relationship between monocular depth and metric depth, thus transforming the original depth map into a metric depth map, enabling the generation of dense depth information and the comprehensive reconstruction of the scene. For the experiments, a high-overlap drone dataset containing 296 images is processed using Metashape to generate depth maps and DSMs as ground truth. Subsequently, we create a low-overlap dataset by selecting 20 images for experimental evaluation. Results demonstrate that while the recovered depth maps and resulting DSMs achieve meter-level accuracy, they provide significantly better completeness compared to traditional methods, particularly in regions covered by single images. This study showcases the potential of monocular depth estimation in low-overlap aerial photogrammetry.
title A Novel Solution for Drone Photogrammetry with Low-overlap Aerial Images using Monocular Depth Estimation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04513