Towards Real-Time 3D Terrain Reconstruction from Aerial Imagery

Qiaosong Wang ()
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Qiaosong Wang: Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA

Geographies, 2024, vol. 4, issue 1, 1-17

Abstract: We present a near real-time solution for 3D reconstruction from aerial images captured by consumer UAVs. Our core idea is to simplify the multi-view stereo problem into a series of two-view stereo matching problems. Our method applies to UAVs equipped with only one camera and does not require special stereo-capturing setups. We found that the neighboring two video frames taken by UAVs flying at a mid-to-high cruising altitude can be approximated as left and right views from a virtual stereo camera. By leveraging GPU-accelerated real-time stereo estimation, efficient PnP correspondence solving algorithms, and an extended Kalman filter, our system simultaneously predicts scene geometry and camera position/orientation from the virtual stereo cameras. Also, this method allows for the user selection of varying baseline lengths, which provides more flexibility given the trade-off between camera resolution, effective measuring distance, flight altitude, and mapping accuracy. Our method outputs dense point clouds at a constant speed of 25 frames per second and is validated on a variety of real-world datasets with satisfactory results.

Keywords: 3D reconstruction; unmanned aerial vehicles; real-time systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q15 Q5 Q53 Q54 Q56 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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