# Flying Co-Stereo: Enabling Long-Range Aerial Dense Mapping via Collaborative Stereo Vision of Dynamic-Baseline

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00546/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Seeing Across Skies and Streets: Feedforward 3D Reconstruction from Satellite, Drone, and Ground Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07978/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lightweight long-range mapping is critical for safe navigation of UAV swarms in large-scale unknown environments. Traditional stereo vision systems with fixed short baselines face limited perception ranges. To address this, we propose Flying Co-Stereo, a cross-agent collaborative stereo vision system that leverages the wide-baseline spatial configuration of two UAVs for long-range dense mapping. Key innovations include: (1) a dual-spectrum visual-inertial-ranging estimator for robust baseline estimation; (2) a hybrid feature association strategy combining deep learning-based cross-agent matching and optical-flow-based intra-agent tracking; (3) A sparse-to-dense depth recovery scheme,refining dense monocular depth predictions using exponential fitting of long-range triangulated sparse landmarks for precise metric-scale mapping. Experiments demonstrate the Flying Co-Stereo system achieves dense 3D mapping up to 70 meters with 2.3%-9.7% relative error, outperforming conventional systems by up to 350% in depth range and 450% in coverage area. The project webpage: https://xingxingzuo.github.io/flying_co_stereo