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Main Authors: Hwang, Seo-Bin, Cho, Yeong-Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06211
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author Hwang, Seo-Bin
Cho, Yeong-Jun
author_facet Hwang, Seo-Bin
Cho, Yeong-Jun
contents Accurate 3D pose estimation of drones is essential for security and surveillance systems. However, existing methods often rely on prior drone information such as physical sizes or 3D meshes. At the same time, current datasets are small-scale, limited to single models, and collected under constrained environments, which makes reliable validation of generalization difficult. We present DroneKey++, a prior-free framework that jointly performs keypoint detection, drone classification, and 3D pose estimation. The framework employs a keypoint encoder for simultaneous keypoint detection and classification, and a pose decoder that estimates 3D pose using ray-based geometric reasoning and class embeddings. To address dataset limitations, we construct 6DroneSyn, a large-scale synthetic benchmark with over 50K images covering 7 drone models and 88 outdoor backgrounds, generated using 360-degree panoramic synthesis. Experiments show that DroneKey++ achieves MAE 17.34 deg and MedAE 17.1 deg for rotation, MAE 0.135 m and MedAE 0.242 m for translation, with inference speeds of 19.25 FPS (CPU) and 414.07 FPS (GPU), demonstrating both strong generalization across drone models and suitability for real-time applications. The dataset is publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06211
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DroneKey++: A Size Prior-free Method and New Benchmark for Drone 3D Pose Estimation from Sequential Images
Hwang, Seo-Bin
Cho, Yeong-Jun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurate 3D pose estimation of drones is essential for security and surveillance systems. However, existing methods often rely on prior drone information such as physical sizes or 3D meshes. At the same time, current datasets are small-scale, limited to single models, and collected under constrained environments, which makes reliable validation of generalization difficult. We present DroneKey++, a prior-free framework that jointly performs keypoint detection, drone classification, and 3D pose estimation. The framework employs a keypoint encoder for simultaneous keypoint detection and classification, and a pose decoder that estimates 3D pose using ray-based geometric reasoning and class embeddings. To address dataset limitations, we construct 6DroneSyn, a large-scale synthetic benchmark with over 50K images covering 7 drone models and 88 outdoor backgrounds, generated using 360-degree panoramic synthesis. Experiments show that DroneKey++ achieves MAE 17.34 deg and MedAE 17.1 deg for rotation, MAE 0.135 m and MedAE 0.242 m for translation, with inference speeds of 19.25 FPS (CPU) and 414.07 FPS (GPU), demonstrating both strong generalization across drone models and suitability for real-time applications. The dataset is publicly available.
title DroneKey++: A Size Prior-free Method and New Benchmark for Drone 3D Pose Estimation from Sequential Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06211