Reconstruction of 3D flight trajectories from ad-hoc camera networks
This enables cheap and easy-to-deploy outside-in tracking for airborne robotic systems, addressing a practical challenge in dynamic flight monitoring.
The paper tackles the problem of reconstructing 3D flight trajectories from unsynchronized, uncalibrated consumer cameras, achieving robust and accurate tracking with cm-level accuracy validated in a field experiment.
We present a method to reconstruct the 3D trajectory of an airborne robotic system only from videos recorded with cameras that are unsynchronized, may feature rolling shutter distortion, and whose viewpoints are unknown. Our approach enables robust and accurate outside-in tracking of dynamically flying targets, with cheap and easy-to-deploy equipment. We show that, in spite of the weakly constrained setting, recent developments in computer vision make it possible to reconstruct trajectories in 3D from unsynchronized, uncalibrated networks of consumer cameras, and validate the proposed method in a realistic field experiment. We make our code available along with the data, including cm-accurate ground-truth from differential GNSS navigation.