Label-Free Long-Horizon 3D UAV Trajectory Prediction via Motion-Aligned RGB and Event Cues
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Abstract (arXiv)
The widespread use of consumer drones has introduced serious challenges for airspace security and public safety. Their high agility and unpredictable motion make drones difficult to track and intercept. While existing methods focus on detecting current positions, many counter-drone strategies rely on forecasting future trajectories and thus require more than reactive detection to be effective. To address this critical gap, we propose an unsupervised vision-based method for predicting the three-dimensional trajectories of drones. Our approach first uses an unsupervised technique to extract drone trajectories from raw LiDAR point clouds, then aligns these trajectories with camera images through motion consistency to generate reliable pseudo-labels. We then combine kinematic estimation with a visual Mamba neural network in a self-supervised manner to predict future drone trajectories. We evaluate our method on the challenging MMAUD dataset, including the V2 sequences that feature wide-field-of-view multimodal sensors and dynamic UAV motion in urban scenes. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms supervised image-only and audio-visual baselines in long-horizon trajectory prediction, reducing 5-second 3D error by around 40 percent without using any manual 3D labels. The proposed system offers a cost-effective, scalable alternative for real-time counter-drone deployment. All code will be released upon acceptance to support reproducible research in the robotics community.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2025.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 2.
4 papers.
- 2025Drone Detection with Event Camerascited by 9
- 2025CETUS: Causal Event-Driven Temporal Modeling With Unified Variable-Rate Schedulingcited by 0
- 2026DynFly: Dynamic-Aware Continuous Trajectory Generation for UAV Vision-Language Navigation in Urban Environmentscited by 0
- 2026Residual Kalman Dynamics for Event-Based UAV Forecastingcited by 0
- 2026Residual Kalman Dynamics for Event-Based UAV Forecasting1 Sep 2026
- 2026DynFly: Dynamic-Aware Continuous Trajectory Generation for UAV Vision-Language Navigation in Urban Environments30 Jun 2026
- 2025CETUS: Causal Event-Driven Temporal Modeling With Unified Variable-Rate Scheduling17 Sep 2025
- 2025Drone Detection with Event Cameras6 Aug 2025
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- 2026CosFly-Track: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Dataset for UAV Visual Tracking via Multi-Constraint Trajectory Optimization
- 2026DroneWAM: Efficient World Action Model for Drone Visual Navigation
- 2026Perception-to-Pursuit: Track-Centric Temporal Reasoning for Open-World Drone Detection and Autonomous Chasing
- 2025Aerial World Model for Long-horizon Visual Generation and Navigation in 3D Space
- 2024AV-DTEC: Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Fusion for Drone Trajectory Estimation and Classification
- 2026CAVEAT: Recurrent Multimodal Diffusion Planning for Mapless Aerial Exploration
- 2025An Efficient LiDAR-Camera Fusion Network for Multi-Class 3D Dynamic Object Detection and Trajectory Prediction
- 2025See, Point, Fly: A Learning-Free VLM Framework for Universal Unmanned Aerial Navigation