# DAPM: UAV Monocular Depth Estimation from Any Height, Pitch, Roll and FOV

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21438 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21438/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Visual Camera Re-Localization from RGB and RGB-D Images Using DSAC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12324/) (2020)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [BinsFormer: Revisiting Adaptive Bins for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00987/) (2022)
- [NeW CRFs: Neural Window Fully-connected CRFs for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01502/) (2022)
- [DepthFormer: Exploiting Long-Range Correlation and Local Information for Accurate Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14211/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Trained Depth Estimation using Self-attention and Discrete Disparity Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13951/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Scene Coordinate Classification and Regression for Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06216/) (2019)
- [InvPT: Inverted Pyramid Multi-task Transformer for Dense Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07997/) (2022)
- [Perspective Fields for Single Image Camera Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03239/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth and Ego-Motion Estimation in Endoscopy: Appearance Flow to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08122/) (2021)
- [SimIPU: Simple 2D Image and 3D Point Cloud Unsupervised Pre-Training for Spatial-Aware Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04680/) (2021)
- [GeoCalib: Learning Single-image Calibration with Geometric Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06704/) (2024)
- [TaskExpert: Dynamically Assembling Multi-Task Representations with Memorial Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15324/) (2023)
- [UAV-ON: A Benchmark for Open-World Object Goal Navigation with Aerial Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00288/) (2025)
- [A Novel Recurrent Encoder-Decoder Structure for Large-Scale Multi-view Stereo Reconstruction from An Open Aerial Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00637/) (2020)
- [SynDrone -- Multi-modal UAV Dataset for Urban Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10491/) (2023)
- [AeroVerse: UAV-Agent Benchmark Suite for Simulating, Pre-training, Finetuning, and Evaluating Aerospace Embodied World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15511/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth, Optical Flow and Pose with Occlusion from 3D Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00766/) (2020)
- [RingMo-Agent: A Unified Remote Sensing Foundation Model for Multi-Platform and Multi-Modal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20776/) (2025)
- [DepthMaster: Taming Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02576/) (2025)
- [RingMo-Aerial: An Aerial Remote Sensing Foundation Model With Affine Transformation Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13366/) (2024)
- [A Review on Viewpoints and Path-planning for UAV-based 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03716/) (2022)
- [SkyScenes: A Synthetic Dataset for Aerial Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06719/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation is a fundamental prerequisite for 3D reconstruction and autonomous navigation in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In practical deployments, UAVs operate under highly dynamic camera poses characterized by continuous variations in height, pitch, roll, and field of view (FOV). Existing monocular depth estimation methods frequently fail to generalize across such diverse perspectives and the expansive scale of depth distributions inherent in aerial scenes. To address these challenges, we establish a quantitative representation of UAV viewing angles through rigorous theoretical analysis, deriving the geometric correspondence between viewing angles and view distances using the ground plane as a reference for observation. Building upon this, we propose Depth Estimation for Any Perspectives Model (DAPM), representing the first monocular framework specifically designed for UAV aerial imagery to jointly estimate camera pose and depth under continuously varying viewpoints. Specifically, we introduce an Ideal Ground Depth (IGD) module that leverages the derived geometric relationships between UAV perspectives and view distances to implement dense camera-pose supervision and enhance depth features. And we further develop a coarse-to-fine Progressive Quantization Bins (PQB) module. By incorporating progressive supervision and hierarchical quantization bins, the PQB module enables robust estimation in complex UAV aerial imagery. To evaluate the proposed framework, we present the UAV Any Perspectives Depth (UAPD) dataset, featuring comprehensive and continuous distributions of pose parameters. Experimental results on UAPD demonstrate that DAPM achieves state-of-the-art performance across both depth and camera-pose estimation metrics. The source code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ThisIsLT/DAPM.