UAVFF3D: A Geometry-Aware Benchmark for Feed-Forward UAV 3D Reconstruction

Existing feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods typically process a bounded number of images and recover cameras and geometry in local or internally normalized frames. Extending them to large-scale UAV mapping requires scalable multi-chunk processing and reliable aggregation, while full Sim(3) alignment can become unstable for near collinear trajectories. We present GeoFF3D, which combines a coordinate-anchored model with a spatial large-scale reconstruction framework (SLRF). The model uses georeferenced camera translations and optional geometric priors to predict camera poses and dense point maps directly in a gravity-aligned Z-up metric frame. SLRF partitions images into spatially overlapping chunks, propagates shared-view priors, and aggregates local reconstructions hierarchically, while remaining applicable to different bounded-view models. Across nine aerial mapping blocks, GeoFF3D achieves the best average reconstruction quality, improving F@5 from 0.829 for Pi3X + SLRF to 0.877. On long UAVScenes sequences, it reaches 0.848, compared with 0.687 for Pi3X + SLRF and 0.451 for the strongest evaluated SLAM/streaming baseline. GeoFF3D reconstructs 2,000 images in approximately five minutes, demonstrating scalable and robust large-scale UAV reconstruction.The code is available at https://github.com/yanxian-ll/GeoFF3D.

While feed-forward 3D reconstruction (3R) offers efficient end-to-end modeling, its application in large-scale UAV mapping is hindered by the prohibitive memory cost of Transformer attention. Current scalable streaming 3R methods assume temporally and spatially continuous inputs, rendering them ineffective for the weakly ordered or unordered image streams common in cross-strip UAV operations. To address this, we propose On-the-Fly3R, a training-free, progressive online 3D reconstruction framework for large-scale UAV images that upgrades various 3R backbones for large-scale UAV scenarios. Our method enables reconstruction from unordered inputs via retrieval-guided dynamic subset construction, which adaptively selects spatially relevant images. To further improve the robustness, a validation-rejection-retry mechanism is designed to guarantee global consistency, performing a pre-integration consistency check and automatically rejecting misaligned images and retrying with alternative subset. Finally, inspired by VSLAM, pose graph optimization based on the retrieval loop closure is employed to mitigate camera drift. Evaluations on several UAV benchmarks show that our On-the-Fly3R successfully scales various 3R models to over 5,000 images across square-kilometer UAV scenes, delivering substantially superior accuracy compared to several SOTA streaming 3R methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Sh1nZzz/On_the_Fly3R

Accurate 3D crop monitoring underpins data-driven precision agriculture by enabling field-scale analysis of plant structure, growth dynamics, and management response. Modern 3D reconstruction methods perform strongly on generic benchmarks, but rendered appearance may not translate into metrically and agronomically useful geometry in crop fields. We introduce UAV3DCrop, a public benchmark of repeated multi-angle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) crop surveys. It contains 88,830 RGB images at $5280 \times 3956$ pixels, with a ground sampling distance of 3.6-5.8 mm, from 91 scenes spanning corn, soybean, wheat, and oat. Track A evaluates seven scene-optimized methods -- Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) variants -- on held-out views, photogrammetry-referenced depth, and canopy-height recovery. Track B tests four pretrained feed-forward models on zero-shot camera-pose and geometry estimation. The scene-optimized methods rank differently across the three targets: Splatfacto-big leads appearance, whereas Scaffold-GS leads depth and is statistically tied with Splatfacto for canopy height. Among feed-forward models, MapAnything leads on seven of the eight metrics, while the remaining models vary more across crops and fail severely on absolute scale in a way that alignment conceals. Repeated acquisitions reveal further sensitivities that differ by output type and by model, associated with position within the acquisition sequence and with tie-point multiplicity. Current 3D reconstruction methods are therefore not yet interchangeable for agronomic use: no single method wins on appearance, geometry, and canopy height at once, and only one of four feed-forward models recovers usable metric scale. The dataset is publicly available at https://link-dev.github.io/UAV3DCrop/