Abstract
Abstract. Lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in image acquisition for 3D reconstruction. With the availability of compact and high-end imaging sensors, UAVs can be the platform for precise photogrammetric reconstruction. However, the completeness and precision of complex environment or targets highly rely on the flight planning due to the self-occlusion of structures. Flight paths with back-and-forth pattern and nadir views will result in incompleteness and precision loss of the 3D reconstruction. Therefore, multiple views from different directions are preferred in order to eliminate the occlusion. We propose a 3D path planning method for multirotor UAVs aiming at capturing images for complete and precise photogrammetric 3D reconstructions. This method takes the coarse model from an initial flight as prior knowledge and estimates its completeness and precision. New imaging positions are then planned taking photogrammetric constraints into account. The real-world experiment on a ship lock shows that the proposed method can acquire a more complete result with similar precision compared with an existing 3D planning method.
Highlights
With the availability of lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and compact imaging sensors, UAVs are being widely used in remote sensing and photogrammetry
We compare the result of aerial triangulation as well as the reconstructed dense image matching (DIM) point cloud form different modes of flight planning, including nadir flight and its combination with the 3D path from the proposed method and Agisoft Metashape (Agisoft LLC, 2019))
We proposed a novel 3D path planning method for UAVs imaging for complete and precise photogrammetric 3D reconstruction
Summary
With the availability of lightweight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and compact imaging sensors, UAVs are being widely used in remote sensing and photogrammetry. The flexibility and mobility of lightweight UAVs have made it possible to capture close-up images for complex urban structures, and generate a realistic model of high-accuracy with the aid of stateof-the-art photogrammetric and structure from motion (SfM) – multi-view stereo (MVS) software, like Pix4DMapper and Agisoft Metashape (Pix4D SA, 2019, Agisoft LLC, 2019). These high-quality 3D models are of great use in the field of cultural heritage documentation and structural inspection (Rodrıguez-Moreno et al, 2018, Chen et al, 2019). Considering the specification of the UAV platform, planning viewpoints in three-dimensional space would be the best solution for lightweight UAVs mapping complex structures
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More From: ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
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