# DroneKey: Drone 3D Pose Estimation in Image Sequences using Gated Key-representation and Pose-adaptive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17746 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17746/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [Joint Training of a Convolutional Network and a Graphical Model for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2984/) (2014)
- [TokenPose: Learning Keypoint Tokens for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03516/) (2021)
- [SimCC: a Simple Coordinate Classification Perspective for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03332/) (2021)
- [EGTR: Extracting Graph from Transformer for Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02072/) (2024)
- [DronePose: Photorealistic UAV-Assistant Dataset Synthesis for 3D Pose Estimation via a Smooth Silhouette Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08823/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DroneKey++: A Size Prior-free Method and New Benchmark for Drone 3D Pose Estimation from Sequential Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06211/) (2026)
- [MF-UAVPose6D: A Model-Free Monocular 6-DoF Pose Estimation Framework for Fixed-Wing UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29697/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating the 3D pose of a drone is important for anti-drone systems, but existing methods struggle with the unique challenges of drone keypoint detection. Drone propellers serve as keypoints but are difficult to detect due to their high visual similarity and diversity of poses. To address these challenges, we propose DroneKey, a framework that combines a 2D keypoint detector and a 3D pose estimator specifically designed for drones. In the keypoint detection stage, we extract two key-representations (intermediate and compact) from each transformer encoder layer and optimally combine them using a gated sum. We also introduce a pose-adaptive Mahalanobis distance in the loss function to ensure stable keypoint predictions across extreme poses. We built new datasets of drone 2D keypoints and 3D pose to train and evaluate our method, which have been publicly released. Experiments show that our method achieves an AP of 99.68% (OKS) in keypoint detection, outperforming existing methods. Ablation studies confirm that the pose-adaptive Mahalanobis loss function improves keypoint prediction stability and accuracy. Additionally, improvements in the encoder design enable real-time processing at 44 FPS. For 3D pose estimation, our method achieved an MAE-angle of 10.62deg, an RMSE of 0.221m, and an MAE-absolute of 0.076m, demonstrating high accuracy and reliability. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/kkanuseobin/DroneKey.