scholarly journals 3D city scale reconstruction using wide area motion imagery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Raphael Viguier

3D reconstruction is one of the most challenging but also most necessary part of computer vision. It is generally applied everywhere, from remote sensing to medical imaging and multimedia. Wide Area Motion Imagery is a field that has gained traction over the recent years. It consists in using an airborne large field of view sensor to cover a typically over a square kilometer area for each captured image. This is particularly valuable data for analysis but the amount of information is overwhelming for any human analyst. Algorithms to efficiently and automatically extract information are therefore needed and 3D reconstruction plays a critical part in it, along with detection and tracking. This dissertation work presents novel reconstruction algorithms to compute a 3D probabilistic space, a set of experiments to efficiently extract photo realistic 3D point clouds and a range of transformations for possible applications of the generated 3D data to filtering, data compression and mapping. The algorithms have been successfully tested on our own datasets provided by Transparent Sky and this thesis work also proposes methods to evaluate accuracy, completeness and photo-consistency. The generated data has been successfully used to improve detection and tracking performances, and allows data compression and extrapolation by generating synthetic images from new point of view, and data augmentation with the inferred occlusion areas.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2113
Author(s):  
Tian Gao ◽  
Feiyu Zhu ◽  
Puneet Paul ◽  
Jaspreet Sandhu ◽  
Henry Akrofi Doku ◽  
...  

The use of 3D plant models for high-throughput phenotyping is increasingly becoming a preferred method for many plant science researchers. Numerous camera-based imaging systems and reconstruction algorithms have been developed for the 3D reconstruction of plants. However, it is still challenging to build an imaging system with high-quality results at a low cost. Useful comparative information for existing imaging systems and their improvements is also limited, making it challenging for researchers to make data-based selections. The objective of this study is to explore the possible solutions to address these issues. We introduce two novel systems for plants of various sizes, as well as a pipeline to generate high-quality 3D point clouds and meshes. The higher accuracy and efficiency of the proposed systems make it a potentially valuable tool for enhancing high-throughput phenotyping by integrating 3D traits for increased resolution and measuring traits that are not amenable to 2D imaging approaches. The study shows that the phenotype traits derived from the 3D models are highly correlated with manually measured phenotypic traits (R2 > 0.91). Moreover, we present a systematic analysis of different settings of the imaging systems and a comparison with the traditional system, which provide recommendations for plant scientists to improve the accuracy of 3D construction. In summary, our proposed imaging systems are suggested for 3D reconstruction of plants. Moreover, the analysis results of the different settings in this paper can be used for designing new customized imaging systems and improving their accuracy.


Author(s):  
A. Al-Rawabdeh ◽  
H. Al-Gurrani ◽  
K. Al-Durgham ◽  
I. Detchev ◽  
F. He ◽  
...  

Landslides are among the major threats to urban landscape and manmade infrastructure. They often cause economic losses, property damages, and loss of lives. Temporal monitoring data of landslides from different epochs empowers the evaluation of landslide progression. Alignment of overlapping surfaces from two or more epochs is crucial for the proper analysis of landslide dynamics. The traditional methods for point-cloud-based landslide monitoring rely on using a variation of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) registration procedure to align any reconstructed surfaces from different epochs to a common reference frame. However, sometimes the ICP-based registration can fail or may not provide sufficient accuracy. For example, point clouds from different epochs might fit to local minima due to lack of geometrical variability within the data. Also, manual interaction is required to exclude any non-stable areas from the registration process. In this paper, a robust image-based registration method is introduced for the simultaneous evaluation of all registration parameters. This includes the Interior Orientation Parameters (IOPs) of the camera and the Exterior Orientation Parameters (EOPs) of the involved images from all available observation epochs via a bundle block adjustment with self-calibration. Next, a semi-global dense matching technique is implemented to generate dense 3D point clouds for each epoch using the images captured in a particular epoch separately. The normal distances between any two consecutive point clouds can then be readily computed, because the point clouds are already effectively co-registered. A low-cost DJI Phantom II Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was customised and used in this research for temporal data collection over an active soil creep area in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. The customisation included adding a GPS logger and a Large-Field-Of-View (LFOV) action camera which facilitated capturing high-resolution geo-tagged images in two epochs over the period of one year (i.e., May 2014 and May 2015). Note that due to the coarse accuracy of the on-board GPS receiver (e.g., +/- 5-10 m) the geo-tagged positions of the images were only used as initial values in the bundle block adjustment. Normal distances, signifying detected changes, varying from 20 cm to 4 m were identified between the two epochs. The accuracy of the co-registered surfaces was estimated by comparing non-active patches within the monitored area of interest. Since these non-active sub-areas are stationary, the computed normal distances should theoretically be close to zero. The quality control of the registration results showed that the average normal distance was approximately 4 cm, which is within the noise level of the reconstructed surfaces.


Author(s):  
Fouad Amer ◽  
Mani Golparvar-Fard

Complete and accurate 3D monitoring of indoor construction progress using visual data is challenging. It requires (a) capturing a large number of overlapping images, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive to collect, and (b) processing using Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms, which can be computationally expensive. To address these inefficiencies, this paper proposes a hybrid SfM-SLAM 3D reconstruction algorithm along with a decentralized data collection workflow to map indoor construction work locations in 3D and any desired frequency. The hybrid 3D reconstruction method is composed of a pipeline of Structure from Motion (SfM) coupled with Multi-View Stereo (MVS) to generate 3D point clouds and a SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithm to register the separately formed models together. Our SfM and SLAM pipelines are built on binary Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) descriptors to tightly couple these two separate reconstruction workflows and enable fast computation. To elaborate the data capture workflow and validate the proposed method, a case study was conducted on a real-world construction site. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our preliminary results show a decrease in both registration error and processing time, demonstrating the potential of using daily images captured by different trades coupled with weekly walkthrough videos captured by a field engineer for complete 3D visual monitoring of indoor construction operations.


Author(s):  
F.I. Apollonio ◽  
A. Ballabeni ◽  
M. Gaiani ◽  
F. Remondino

Every day new tools and algorithms for automated image processing and 3D reconstruction purposes become available, giving the possibility to process large networks of unoriented and markerless images, delivering sparse 3D point clouds at reasonable processing time. In this paper we evaluate some feature-based methods used to automatically extract the tie points necessary for calibration and orientation procedures, in order to better understand their performances for 3D reconstruction purposes. The performed tests – based on the analysis of the SIFT algorithm and its most used variants – processed some datasets and analysed various interesting parameters and outcomes (e.g. number of oriented cameras, average rays per 3D points, average intersection angles per 3D points, theoretical precision of the computed 3D object coordinates, etc.).


Author(s):  
A. Al-Rawabdeh ◽  
H. Al-Gurrani ◽  
K. Al-Durgham ◽  
I. Detchev ◽  
F. He ◽  
...  

Landslides are among the major threats to urban landscape and manmade infrastructure. They often cause economic losses, property damages, and loss of lives. Temporal monitoring data of landslides from different epochs empowers the evaluation of landslide progression. Alignment of overlapping surfaces from two or more epochs is crucial for the proper analysis of landslide dynamics. The traditional methods for point-cloud-based landslide monitoring rely on using a variation of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) registration procedure to align any reconstructed surfaces from different epochs to a common reference frame. However, sometimes the ICP-based registration can fail or may not provide sufficient accuracy. For example, point clouds from different epochs might fit to local minima due to lack of geometrical variability within the data. Also, manual interaction is required to exclude any non-stable areas from the registration process. In this paper, a robust image-based registration method is introduced for the simultaneous evaluation of all registration parameters. This includes the Interior Orientation Parameters (IOPs) of the camera and the Exterior Orientation Parameters (EOPs) of the involved images from all available observation epochs via a bundle block adjustment with self-calibration. Next, a semi-global dense matching technique is implemented to generate dense 3D point clouds for each epoch using the images captured in a particular epoch separately. The normal distances between any two consecutive point clouds can then be readily computed, because the point clouds are already effectively co-registered. A low-cost DJI Phantom II Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was customised and used in this research for temporal data collection over an active soil creep area in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. The customisation included adding a GPS logger and a Large-Field-Of-View (LFOV) action camera which facilitated capturing high-resolution geo-tagged images in two epochs over the period of one year (i.e., May 2014 and May 2015). Note that due to the coarse accuracy of the on-board GPS receiver (e.g., +/- 5-10 m) the geo-tagged positions of the images were only used as initial values in the bundle block adjustment. Normal distances, signifying detected changes, varying from 20 cm to 4 m were identified between the two epochs. The accuracy of the co-registered surfaces was estimated by comparing non-active patches within the monitored area of interest. Since these non-active sub-areas are stationary, the computed normal distances should theoretically be close to zero. The quality control of the registration results showed that the average normal distance was approximately 4 cm, which is within the noise level of the reconstructed surfaces.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyyed Meghdad Hasheminasab ◽  
Tian Zhou ◽  
Ayman Habib

Acquired imagery by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been widely used for three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction/modeling in various digital agriculture applications, such as phenotyping, crop monitoring, and yield prediction. 3D reconstruction from well-textured UAV-based images has matured and the user community has access to several commercial and opensource tools that provide accurate products at a high level of automation. However, in some applications, such as digital agriculture, due to repetitive image patterns, these approaches are not always able to produce reliable/complete products. The main limitation of these techniques is their inability to establish a sufficient number of correctly matched features among overlapping images, causing incomplete and/or inaccurate 3D reconstruction. This paper provides two structure from motion (SfM) strategies, which use trajectory information provided by an onboard survey-grade global navigation satellite system/inertial navigation system (GNSS/INS) and system calibration parameters. The main difference between the proposed strategies is that the first one—denoted as partially GNSS/INS-assisted SfM—implements the four stages of an automated triangulation procedure, namely, imaging matching, relative orientation parameters (ROPs) estimation, exterior orientation parameters (EOPs) recovery, and bundle adjustment (BA). The second strategy— denoted as fully GNSS/INS-assisted SfM—removes the EOPs estimation step while introducing a random sample consensus (RANSAC)-based strategy for removing matching outliers before the BA stage. Both strategies modify the image matching by restricting the search space for conjugate points. They also implement a linear procedure for ROPs’ refinement. Finally, they use the GNSS/INS information in modified collinearity equations for a simpler BA procedure that could be used for refining system calibration parameters. Eight datasets over six agricultural fields are used to evaluate the performance of the developed strategies. In comparison with a traditional SfM framework and Pix4D Mapper Pro, the proposed strategies are able to generate denser and more accurate 3D point clouds as well as orthophotos without any gaps.


Author(s):  
D. Craciun ◽  
A. Serna Morales ◽  
J.-E. Deschaud ◽  
B. Marcotegui ◽  
F. Goulette

The currently existing mobile mapping systems equipped with active 3D sensors allow to acquire the environment with high sampling rates at high vehicle velocities. While providing an effective solution for environment sensing over large scale distances, such acquisition provides only a discrete representation of the geometry. Thus, a continuous map of the underlying surface must be built. Mobile acquisition introduces several constraints for the state-of-the-art surface reconstruction algorithms. Smoothing becomes a difficult task for recovering sharp depth features while avoiding mesh shrinkage. In addition, interpolation-based techniques are not suitable for noisy datasets acquired by Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems. Furthermore, scalability is a major concern for enabling real-time rendering over large scale distances while preserving geometric details. This paper presents a fully automatic ground surface reconstruction framework capable to deal with the aforementioned constraints. The proposed method exploits the quasi-flat geometry of the ground throughout a morphological segmentation algorithm. Then, a planar Delaunay triangulation is applied in order to reconstruct the ground surface. A smoothing procedure eliminates high frequency peaks, while preserving geometric details in order to provide a regular ground surface. Finally, a decimation step is applied in order to cope with scalability constraints over large scale distances. Experimental results on real data acquired in large urban environments are presented and a performance evaluation with respect to ground truth measurements demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.


Author(s):  
M. Vlachos ◽  
L. Berger ◽  
R. Mathelier ◽  
P. Agrafiotis ◽  
D. Skarlatos

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> This paper presents an investigation as to whether and how the selection of the SfM-MVS software affects the 3D reconstruction of submerged archaeological sites. Specifically, Agisoft Photoscan, VisualSFM, SURE, 3D Zephyr and Reality Capture software were used and evaluated according to their performance in 3D reconstruction using specific metrics over the reconstructed underwater scenes. It must be clarified that the scope of this study is not to evaluate specific algorithms or steps that the various software use, but to evaluate the final results and specifically the generated 3D point clouds. To address the above research issues, a dataset from the ancient shipwreck, laying at 45 meters below sea level, is used. The dataset is composed of 19 images having very small camera to object distance (1 meter), and 42 images with higher camera to object distance (3 meters) images. Using a common bundle adjustment for all 61 images, a reference point cloud resulted from the lower dataset is used to compare it with the point clouds of the higher dataset generated using the different photogrammetric packages. Following that, a comparison regarding the number of total points, cloud to cloud distances, surface roughness, surface density and a combined 3D metric was done to evaluate and see which one performed the best.</p>


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