Dense 3D-Reconstruction From Monocular Image Sequences for Computationally Constrained UAS

Matthias Domnik, Pedro Proenca, Jeff Delaune, Jorg Thiem, Roland Brockers; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2021, pp. 1820-1828

Abstract


The ability to find safe landing sites over complex 3D terrain is an essential safety feature for fully autonomous small unmanned aerial systems (UAS), which requires on-board perception for 3D reconstruction and terrain analysis if the overflown terrain is unknown. This is a challenge for UAS that are limited in size, weight and computational power, such as small rotorcrafts executing autonomous missions on Earth, or in planetary applications such as the Mars Helicopter. For such a computationally constraint system, we propose a structure from motion approach that uses inputs from a single downward facing camera to produce dense point clouds of the overflown terrain in real time. In contrast to existing approaches, our method uses metric pose information from a visual-inertial odometry algorithm as camera pose priors, which allows deploying a fast pose refinement step to align camera frames such that a conventional stereo algorithm can be used for dense 3D reconstruction. We validate the performance of our approach with extensive evaluations in simulation, and demonstrate the feasibility with data from UAS flights.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Domnik_2021_WACV, author = {Domnik, Matthias and Proenca, Pedro and Delaune, Jeff and Thiem, Jorg and Brockers, Roland}, title = {Dense 3D-Reconstruction From Monocular Image Sequences for Computationally Constrained UAS}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)}, month = {January}, year = {2021}, pages = {1820-1828} }