Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have demonstrated strong potential for large-scale UAV-based 3D reconstruction tasks by fitting the appearance of images. However, real-world large-scale captures are often based on multi-temporal data capture, where illumination inconsistencies across different times of day can significantly lead to color artifacts, geometric inaccuracies, and inconsistent appearance. Due to the lack of UAV datasets that systematically capture the same areas under varying illumination conditions, this challenge remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduceSkyLume, a large-scale, real-world UAV dataset specifically designed for studying illumination robust 3D reconstruction in urban scene modeling: (1) We collect data from 10 urban regions data comprising more than 100k high resolution UAV images (four oblique views and nadir), where each region is captured at three periods of the day to systematically isolate illumination changes. (2) To support precise evaluation of geometry and appearance, we provide per-scene LiDAR scans and accurate 3D ground-truth for assessing depth, surface normals, and reconstruction quality under varying illumination. (3) For the inverse rendering task, we introduce the Temporal Consistency Coefficient (TCC), a metric that measuress cross-time albedo stability and directly evaluates the robustness of the disentanglement of light and material. We aim for this resource to serve as a foundation that advances research and real-world evaluation in large-scale inverse rendering, geometry reconstruction, and novel view synthesis.
CityCode: Building Agent-Operable 3D Cities from Sparse Aerial Observations
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；SenseTime（商汤科技）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Recovering surface albedos from photogrammetric images for realistic rendering and synthetic environments can greatly facilitate its downstream applications in VR/AR/MR and digital twins. The textured 3D models from standard photogrammetric pipelines are suboptimal to these applications because these textures are directly derived from images, which intrinsically embedded the spatially and temporally variant environmental lighting information, such as the sun illumination, direction, causing different looks of the surface, making such models less realistic when used in 3D rendering under synthe…
Fraunhofer IOSB（弗劳恩霍夫IOSB）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
With the technological advancements of aerial imagery and accurate 3d reconstruction of urban environments, more and more attention has been paid to the automated analyses of urban areas. In our work, we examine two important aspects that allow live analysis of building structures in city models given oblique aerial imagery, namely automatic building extraction with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and selective real-time depth estimation from aerial imagery. We use transfer learning to train the Faster R-CNN method for real-time deep object detection, by combining a large ground-based dat…
SemCityLoc: Aerial 6DoF Localization Using Semantic 3D City Models
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Horizon-GS: Unified 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale Aerial-to-Ground Scenes
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Integration of aerial and ground images has been proved as an efficient approach to enhance the surface reconstruction in urban environments. However, as the first step, the feature point matching between aerial and ground images is remarkably difficult, due to the large differences in viewpoint and illumination conditions. Previous studies based on geometry-aware image rectification have alleviated this problem, but the performance and convenience of this strategy is limited by several flaws, e.g. quadratic image pairs, segregated extraction of descriptors and occlusions. To address these pro…
We present UrbanScene3D, a large-scale data platform for research of urban scene perception and reconstruction. UrbanScene3D contains over 128k high-resolution images covering 16 scenes including large-scale real urban regions and synthetic cities with 136 km^2 area in total. The dataset also contains high-precision LiDAR scans and hundreds of image sets with different observation patterns, which provide a comprehensive benchmark to design and evaluate aerial path planning and 3D reconstruction algorithms. In addition, the dataset, which is built on Unreal Engine and Airsim simulator together …
Aerial images are often degraded by space-varying motion blur and simultaneous uneven illumination. To recover high-quality aerial image from its non-uniform version, we propose a novel patch-wise restoration approach based on a key observation that the degree of blurring is inevitably affected by the illuminated conditions. A non-local Retinex model is developed to accurately estimate the reflectance component from the degraded aerial image. Thereafter the uneven illumination is corrected well. And then non-uniform coupled blurring in the enhanced reflectance image is alleviated and transform…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI)（荷兰皇家气象研究所）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Environment Protection Authority Victoria（维多利亚州环境保护局）
Analysis of overhead imagery using computer vision is a problem that has received considerable attention in academic literature. Most techniques that operate in this space are both highly specialised and require expensive manual annotation of large datasets. These problems are addressed here through the development of a more generic framework, incorporating advances in representation learning which allows for more flexibility in analysing new categories of imagery with limited labeled data. First, a robust representation of an unlabeled aerial imagery dataset was created based on the momentum …
Urban trees help regulate temperature, reduce energy consumption, improve urban air quality, reduce wind speeds, and mitigating the urban heat island effect. Urban trees also play a key role in climate change mitigation and global warming by capturing and storing atmospheric carbon-dioxide which is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases. Automated tree detection and species classification using aerial imagery can be a powerful tool for sustainable forest and urban tree management. Hence, This study first offers a pipeline for generating labelled dataset of urban trees using Google Map's a…
Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）
In this paper, we present a system for modelling vehicle motion in an urban scene from low frame-rate aerial video. In particular, the scene is modelled as a probability distribution over velocities at every pixel in the image. We describe the complete system for acquiring this model. The video is captured from a helicopter and stabilized by warping the images to match an orthorectified image of the area. A pixel classifier is applied to the stabilized images, and the response is segmented to determine car locations and orientations. The results are fed in to a tracking scheme which tracks car…
Cross-Modal Urban Sensing: Evaluating Sound-Vision Alignment Across Street-Level and Aerial Imagery
Department of Geography, University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学地理系）；Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University（埃默里大学环境科学系）；University of Canterbury（坎特伯雷大学）；School of Resource and Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University（武汉大学资源与环境科学学院）
Univ Lyon（里昂大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；ENS de Lyon（里昂高等师范学院）；Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学克洛德·贝尔纳大学）；Central European University（中欧大学）
Urbanisation is a great challenge for modern societies, promising better access to economic opportunities while widening socioeconomic inequalities. Accurately tracking how this process unfolds has been challenging for traditional data collection methods, while remote sensing information offers an alternative to gather a more complete view on these societal changes. By feeding a neural network with satellite images one may recover the socioeconomic information associated to that area, however these models lack to explain how visual features contained in a sample, trigger a given prediction. He…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Fraunhofer IOSB（弗劳恩霍夫应用光学与系统研究所）
Understanding the complex urban infrastructure with centimeter-level accuracy is essential for many applications from autonomous driving to mapping, infrastructure monitoring, and urban management. Aerial images provide valuable information over a large area instantaneously; nevertheless, no current dataset captures the complexity of aerial scenes at the level of granularity required by real-world applications. To address this, we introduce SkyScapes, an aerial image dataset with highly-accurate, fine-grained annotations for pixel-level semantic labeling. SkyScapes provides annotations for 31 …
Fraunhofer FKIE（弗劳恩霍夫通信、信息处理与人机工程研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Visual Place Recognition and Visual Localization are essential components in navigation and mapping for autonomous vehicles especially in GNSS-denied navigation scenarios. Recent work has focused on ground or close to ground applications such as self-driving cars or indoor-scenarios and low-altitude drone flights. However, applications such as Urban Air Mobility require operations in large-scale outdoor environments at medium to high altitudes. We present a new dataset named VPAIR. The dataset was recorded on board a light aircraft flying at an altitude of more than 300 meters above ground cap…
Korea University（高丽大学）；Hallym University（翰林大学）；Ajou University（亚洲大学）；UC-Irvine（加州大学尔湾分校）
Autonomous surveillance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to observe the streets of the city for any suspicious activities. This paper utilizes surveillance UAVs for the purpose of detecting the presence of a fire in the streets. An extensive database is collected from UAV surveillance drones. With the aid of artificial intelligence (AI), fire stations can swiftly identify the presence of a fire emerging in the neighborhood. Spatio-temporal split learning is applied to this scenario to preserve privacy and globally train a fire classification model. Fires are hazardous natural disas…
Illumination effects in images, specifically cast shadows and shading, have been shown to decrease the performance of deep neural networks on a large number of vision-based detection, recognition and segmentation tasks in urban driving scenes. A key factor that contributes to this performance gap is the lack of `time-of-day' diversity within real, labeled datasets. There have been impressive advances in the realm of image to image translation in transferring previously unseen visual effects into a dataset, specifically in day to night translation. However, it is not easy to constrain what visu…
Manipal Institute of Technology（马尼帕尔理工学院）；Manipal Academy of Higher Education（马尼帕尔高等教育学院）
Semantic segmentation of aerial videos has been extensively used for decision making in monitoring environmental changes, urban planning, and disaster management. The reliability of these decision support systems is dependent on the accuracy of the video semantic segmentation algorithms. The existing CNN based video semantic segmentation methods have enhanced the image semantic segmentation methods by incorporating an additional module such as LSTM or optical flow for computing temporal dynamics of the video which is a computational overhead. The proposed research work modifies the CNN archite…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））
Vegetation, trees in particular, sequester carbon by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, the lack of efficient quantification methods of carbon stored in trees renders it difficult to track the process. We present an approach to estimate the carbon storage in trees based on fusing multi-spectral aerial imagery and LiDAR data to identify tree coverage, geometric shape, and tree species -- key attributes to carbon storage quantification. We demonstrate that tree species information and their three-dimensional geometric shapes can be estimated from aerial imagery in order to de…
MARTIAN: A Rendering Framework for Aerial Mars Imagery from HiRISE Orbital Data
Space Robotics Research Group, SnT, University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学空间机器人研究组）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；IRL 2958 GT-CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心GT联合研究实验室（IRL 2958））
We introduce Object-Guided Localization (OGuL) based on a novel method of local-feature matching. Direct matching of local features is sensitive to significant changes in illumination. In contrast, object detection often survives severe changes in lighting conditions. The proposed method first detects semantic objects and establishes correspondences of those objects between images. Object correspondences provide local coarse alignment of the images in the form of a planar homography. These homographies are consequently used to guide the matching of local features. Experiments on standard urban…
Visual question answering (VQA) is an important and challenging multimodal task in computer vision. Recently, a few efforts have been made to bring VQA task to aerial images, due to its potential real-world applications in disaster monitoring, urban planning, and digital earth product generation. However, not only the huge variation in the appearance, scale and orientation of the concepts in aerial images, but also the scarcity of the well-annotated datasets restricts the development of VQA in this domain. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, HRVQA, which provides collected 53512 aerial …
Unmanned aerial vehicles now make it possible to obtain high quality aerial imagery at a low cost, but processing those images into a single, useful entity is neither simple nor seamless. Specifically, there are factors that must be addressed when merging multiple images into a single coherent one. While ortho-rectification can be done, it tends to be expensive and time consuming. Image stitching offers a more economical, low-tech approach. However direct application tends to fail for low-elevation imagery due to one or more factors including insufficient keypoints, parallax issues, and homoge…
University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）；Woven by Toyota（丰田编织公司）；University of Technology Nuremberg（纽伦堡工业大学）
Lane graph estimation is an essential and highly challenging task in automated driving and HD map learning. Existing methods using either onboard or aerial imagery struggle with complex lane topologies, out-of-distribution scenarios, or significant occlusions in the image space. Moreover, merging overlapping lane graphs to obtain consistent large-scale graphs remains difficult. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel bottom-up approach to lane graph estimation from aerial imagery that aggregates multiple overlapping graphs into a single consistent graph. Due to its modular design, our…
The past few years have seen an increased interest in aerial image object detection due to its critical value to large-scale geo-scientific research like environmental studies, urban planning, and intelligence monitoring. However, the task is very challenging due to the birds-eye view perspective, complex backgrounds, large and various image sizes, different appearances of objects, and the scarcity of well-annotated datasets. Recent advances in computer vision have shown promise tackling the challenge. Specifically, Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet) was proposed to extract multi-scale featu…
