# Real-Time Hybrid Mapping of Populated Indoor Scenes using a Low-Cost Monocular UAV

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02453 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02453/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [NeuralRecon: Real-Time Coherent 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00681/) (2021)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [Single-Shot Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation From Monocular RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03453/) (2017)
- [Long-term Human Motion Prediction with Scene Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03672/) (2020)
- [Populating 3D Scenes by Learning Human-Scene Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11581/) (2020)
- [CNN-SLAM: Real-time dense monocular SLAM with learned depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03489/) (2017)
- [VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01583/) (2017)
- [LCR-Net++: Multi-person 2D and 3D Pose Detection in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00455/) (2018)
- [XNect: Real-time Multi-Person 3D Motion Capture with a Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00837/) (2019)
- [DeepVideoMVS: Multi-View Stereo on Video with Recurrent Spatio-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02177/) (2020)
- [Exploiting temporal consistency for real-time video depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03706/) (2019)
- [MVDepthNet: Real-time Multiview Depth Estimation Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08563/) (2018)
- [InfiniTAM v3: A Framework for Large-Scale 3D Reconstruction with Loop Closure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00783/) (2017)
- [PandaNet : Anchor-Based Single-Shot Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02471/) (2021)
- [Multi-Person 3D Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10854/) (2019)
- [Autonomous Aerial Cinematography In Unstructured Environments With Learned Artistic Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06988/) (2019)
- [Collaborative Large-Scale Dense 3D Reconstruction with Online Inter-Agent Pose Optimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08361/) (2018)
- [Human Motion Capture Using a Drone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06112/) (2018)
- [3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Collaborative Aerial Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03936/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used for many applications in recent years, from urban search and rescue, to agricultural surveying, to autonomous underground mine exploration. However, deploying UAVs in tight, indoor spaces, especially close to humans, remains a challenge. One solution, when limited payload is required, is to use micro-UAVs, which pose less risk to humans and typically cost less to replace after a crash. However, micro-UAVs can only carry a limited sensor suite, e.g. a monocular camera instead of a stereo pair or LiDAR, complicating tasks like dense mapping and markerless multi-person 3D human pose estimation, which are needed to operate in tight environments around people. Monocular approaches to such tasks exist, and dense monocular mapping approaches have been successfully deployed for UAV applications. However, despite many recent works on both marker-based and markerless multi-UAV single-person motion capture, markerless single-camera multi-person 3D human pose estimation remains a much earlier-stage technology, and we are not aware of existing attempts to deploy it in an aerial context. In this paper, we present what is thus, to our knowledge, the first system to perform simultaneous mapping and multi-person 3D human pose estimation from a monocular camera mounted on a single UAV. In particular, we show how to loosely couple state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D human pose estimation approaches to reconstruct a hybrid map of a populated indoor scene in real time. We validate our component-level design choices via extensive experiments on the large-scale ScanNet and GTA-IM datasets. To evaluate our system-level performance, we also construct a new Oxford Hybrid Mapping dataset of populated indoor scenes.