AirZoo: A Unified Large-Scale Dataset for Grounding Aerial Geometric 3D Vision

TL;DR

AirZoo introduces a large-scale, diverse dataset with rich geometric annotations for aerial 3D vision, enabling improved model training and benchmarking in UAV-based sensing.

Contribution

It provides a scalable generation pipeline, extensive scene diversity, and precise geometric annotations, filling a critical gap in aerial geometric 3D vision datasets.

Findings

Fine-tuning on AirZoo improves state-of-the-art model performance.

AirZoo enables effective pre-training for aerial spatial tasks.

Experiments show substantial performance gains across multiple benchmarks.

Abstract

Despite the rapid progress in data-driven 3D vision, aerial geometric 3D vision remains a formidable challenge due to the severe scarcity of large-scale, high-fidelity training data. Existing benchmarks, predominantly biased toward ground-level or object-centric views, do not account for complex viewpoint transformations and diverse environmental conditions in UAV-based sensing. To bridge this critical gap, we propose AirZoo, a unified large-scale dataset and benchmark for grounding aerial geometric 3D vision. AirZoo possesses three appealing properties: 1) Scalable Generation Pipeline: Leveraging freely available, world-scale photogrammetric 3D meshes, it renders vast outdoor environments with customizable UAV flight trajectories and configurable weather/illumination. 2) Comprehensive Scene Diversity: It provides the most extensive coverage of region types to date (spanning 378 regions across 22 countries), systematically encompassing both highly structured urban landscapes and complex unstructured natural environments. 3) Rich Geometric Annotations: Each frame provides synchronized, pixel-level metric depth and precise 6-DoF geo-referenced poses, essential for geometry-aware learning. Through three rigorous evaluation tracks -- aerial image retrieval, cross-view matching, and multi-view 3D reconstruction -- we demonstrate that AirZoo serves as a powerful pre-training engine. Extensive experiments on both public and newly collected real-world benchmarks reveal that fine-tuning on AirZoo yields substantial performance gains for SoTA models (e.g., MegaLoc, RoMa, VGGT, and Depth Anything 3), establishing a new performance upper bound for aerial spatial intelligence.