{"slug": "orthotrack-continuous-6-dof-uav-trajectory-estimation-anchored-in-public", "title": "OrthoTrack: Continuous 6-DoF UAV Trajectory Estimation Anchored in Public Orthophotos", "summary": "Researchers introduced OrthoTrack, a training-free system that estimates continuous 6-DoF UAV trajectories using public orthophotos and surface models, eliminating drift and GPS dependency. The system runs in real time on a single GPU and outperforms baselines on the new MovingDrone Dataset and real-world benchmarks.", "body_md": "arXiv:2606.25245v1 Announce Type: new\nAbstract: Continuous 6-DoF pose estimation is essential for autonomous UAV operations. Yet, existing visual odometry and SLAM methods accumulate drift and yield only relative, up-to-scale trajectories. Single-frame geo-localization, in turn, discards temporal continuity and remains too slow for real-time use. We present OrthoTrack, a training-free system that estimates continuous 6-DoF UAV trajectories using only publicly available orthophotos and surface models as a map prior. OrthoTrack matches keyframes against the orthophoto and lifts correspondences to metric 3D via the surface model. It then propagates these map-anchored correspondences to intermediate frames with optical flow, producing absolute, metrically scaled poses at every frame without GPS or post-hoc alignment. We also introduce the MovingDrone Dataset, a large-scale benchmark pairing photorealistic UAV sequences with dense 6-DoF ground truth and co-registered multi-modal geodata including multi-temporal orthophotos. On MovingDrone and real-world benchmarks, OrthoTrack runs in real time on a single GPU. It outperforms all baselines by a large margin, even those receiving oracle scale and alignment. By relying on publicly available geodata, OrthoTrack enables deployment to new regions without site-specific adaptation.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orthotrack-continuous-6-dof-uav-trajectory-estimation-anchored-in-public", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25245", "published_at": "2026-06-25 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-25 04:20:06.339495+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["computer-vision", "autonomous-vehicles", "machine-learning"], "entities": ["OrthoTrack", "MovingDrone Dataset"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orthotrack-continuous-6-dof-uav-trajectory-estimation-anchored-in-public", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orthotrack-continuous-6-dof-uav-trajectory-estimation-anchored-in-public.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orthotrack-continuous-6-dof-uav-trajectory-estimation-anchored-in-public.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/orthotrack-continuous-6-dof-uav-trajectory-estimation-anchored-in-public.jsonld"}}