Evaluation of Monocular SLAM Systems on High-Altitude Nadir UAV Footage

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18632v2
• Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:24:53 GMT
• Title: Evaluation of Monocular SLAM Systems on High-Altitude Nadir UAV Footage
• Abstract summary: We benchmark five monocular SLAM systems on local UAV flights, synthetic city-scale imagery, and long-range aerial sequences.<n>Overall, DROID-SLAM performs best, averaging 2.88% of reference path length across completed runs.
• Score: 0.9558392439655014
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Aerial nadir video combines weak geometric constraints with severe perceptual aliasing, making it a difficult regime for monocular SLAM. We benchmark five monocular SLAM systems on local UAV flights, synthetic city-scale imagery, and long-range aerial sequences. To isolate visual performance, we provide no inertial or GNSS aiding. Performance varies strongly with environment and trajectory scale: MASt3R-SLAM achieves the lowest mean horizontal MAE on the five DJI flights (0.53% of reference path length), whereas no system consistently preserves global trajectory shape on the long GES and ALTO sequences. Overall, DROID-SLAM performs best, averaging 2.88% of reference path length across completed runs. Vertical position remains poor, and large-area trajectories remain highly distorted despite loop-closure capability. Current monocular SLAM methods are by themselves therefore insufficient for reliable visual-only aerial navigation.

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