AI RESEARCH
Thermal Image Refinement with Depth Estimation using Recurrent Networks for Monocular ORB-SLAM3
arXiv CS.CV
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ArXi:2603.14998v1 Announce Type: new Autonomous navigation in GPS-denied and visually degraded environments remains challenging for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To this end, we investigate the use of a monocular thermal camera as a standalone sensor on a UAV platform for real-time depth estimation and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). To extract depth information from thermal images, we propose a novel pipeline employing a lightweight supervised network with recurrent blocks (RBs) integrated to capture temporal dependencies, enabling robust predictions.