Multi-robot Systems - Bachelor's Thesis

Monocular 3D Scene Reconstruction for an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Matouš Melecký

Abstract

The real-time 3D reconstruction of the surrounding scene is a key part in the

pipeline of the autonomous flight of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The com-

bination of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a monocular camera is a

common and inexpensive sensor setup that can be used to recover the scale of the

environment. This thesis aims to develop an algorithm solving this problem for

this particular setup by leveraging the existing visual-inertial navigation system

(VINS) odometry algorithms for localisation.

Two algorithms are developed, wide-baseline matching-based and small-baseline

tracking-based. Also, an offline post-processing structure-refinement step is im-

plemented to further improve the resulting structure. The algorithms and the

refinement step are then evaluated on publicly available datasets. Furthermore,

they are tested in a simulator and a real-world experiment is conducted.

The results show that the tracking-based algorithm is significantly more perfor-

mant. Importantly, tests on the datasets and the real-world experiments suggest

that this algorithm can be practically employed in application scenarios.

Keywords: unmanned areal vehicle, 3D scene reconstruction, structure from

motion, monocular simultaneous localisation and mapping, non-linear least

squares

Thesis Attachments

Source code, thesis in pdf, etc.
https://nasmrs.felk.cvut.cz/index.php/s/fmXkG47zUiz3kUg/download

Datasets

Datasets as recorded for evaluation of the 3D reconstruction of outdoor scene at Karlovo namesti.
https://nasmrs.felk.cvut.cz/index.php/s/M7ZqiJaLCTu3DeC

Resulting point clouds