Synthetic Aperture Imaging With Drones

Bimber, Oliver; Kurmi, Indrajit; Schedl, David C.; Potel, Mike

doi:10.1109/mcg.2019.2896024

Cited by 20 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…1 illustrates an example where AOS was used to uncover the ruins of a 19th century fortification system that is concealed by dense forest and shrubs. The interested reader is referred to [21], [22] for more details.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Statistical View on Synthetic Aperture Imaging for Occlusion Removal

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Synthetic apertures find applications in many fields, such as radar, radio telescopes, microscopy, sonar, ultrasound, LiDAR, and optical imaging. They approximate the signal of a single hypothetical wide aperture sensor with either an array of static small aperture sensors or a single moving small aperture sensor. Common sense in synthetic aperture sampling is that a dense sampling pattern within a wide aperture is required to reconstruct a clear signal. In this article we show that there exists practical limits to both, synthetic aperture size and number of samples for the application of occlusion removal. This leads to an understanding on how to design synthetic aperture sampling patterns and sensors in a most optimal and practically efficient way. We apply our findings to airborne optical sectioning which uses camera drones and synthetic aperture imaging to computationally remove occluding vegetation or trees for inspecting ground surfaces.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Statistical View on Synthetic Aperture Imaging for Occlusion Removal

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Synthetic aperture imaging has great potential for occlusion removal in different application domains. In the visible range, it was used for making archeological discoveries [22]. In the infrared range, it might find applications in search-and-rescue, animal inspection, or border control.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With airborne optical sectioning (AOS) [21,22], we apply camera drones for synthetic aperture imaging. They sample the optical signal of wide synthetic apertures (up to 100 m diameter) with multiscopic video images as an unstructured (irregularly sampled) light field to support optical slicing by image integration.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thermal Airborne Optical Sectioning

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We apply a multi-spectral (RGB and thermal) camera drone for synthetic aperture imaging to computationally remove occluding vegetation for revealing hidden objects, as required in archeology, search-and-rescue, animal inspection, and border control applications. The radiated heat signal of strongly occluded targets, such as a human bodies hidden in dense shrub, can be made visible by integrating multiple thermal recordings from slightly different perspectives, while being entirely invisible in RGB recordings or unidentifiable in single thermal images. We collect bits of heat radiation through the occluder volume over a wide synthetic aperture range and computationally combine them to a clear image. This requires precise estimation of the drone's position and orientation for each capturing pose, which is supported by applying computer vision algorithms on the high resolution RGB images.

show abstract

“…This results in a 3D position and the 3D orientation of the drone (i.e., the attached cameras) for each recorded image pair. See [1] for more details on the AOS process.…”

Section: Synthetic Aperture Imaging and Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Synthetic apertures (SA) sensing samples the signal of wide aperture sensors with either arrays of static or single moving smaller aperture sensors whose individual signals are computationally combined to increase resolution, depth-of-field, frame rate, contrast, and signal-to-noise ratio. This principle has been used for radar, telescopes, microscopes, sonar, ultrasound, laser, and optical imaging [1]. With Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS) [2], [3], [4], we have introduced a synthetic aperture imaging technique that captures an unstructured light field with an aircraft.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast Automatic Visibility Optimization for Thermal Synthetic Aperture Visualization

Kurmi

Schedl

Bimber

2021

IEEE Geosci. Remote Sensing Lett.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we describe and validate the first fully automatic parameter optimization for thermal synthetic aperture visualization. It replaces previous manual exploration of the parameter space, which is time consuming and error prone. We prove that the visibility of targets in thermal integral images is proportional to the variance of the targets' image. Since this is invariant to occlusion it represents a suitable objective function for optimization. Our findings have the potential to enable fully autonomous search and recuse operations with camera drones.

show abstract

Synthetic Aperture Imaging With Drones

Cited by 20 publications

References 17 publications

A Statistical View on Synthetic Aperture Imaging for Occlusion Removal

A Statistical View on Synthetic Aperture Imaging for Occlusion Removal

Thermal Airborne Optical Sectioning

Fast Automatic Visibility Optimization for Thermal Synthetic Aperture Visualization

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About