OpenREALM: Real-time Mapping for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

TL;DR

OpenREALM is a real-time UAV mapping framework that creates high-resolution mosaics, 3D surface models, and orthophotos, enabling live updates and georeferenced data for various UAV applications.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile real-time mapping system for UAVs that supports simple stitching, 3D surface recovery, and live visualization, with publicly available source code.

Findings

Real-time high-resolution mosaics generated during UAV flights

Support for 3D surface reconstruction and orthophotos

Live map updates accessible to operators on the ground

Abstract

This paper presents OpenREALM, a real-time mapping framework for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). A camera attached to the onboard computer of a moving UAV is utilized to acquire high resolution image mosaics of a targeted area of interest. Different modes of operation allow OpenREALM to perform simple stitching assuming an approximate plane ground, or to fully recover complex 3D surface information to extract both elevation maps and geometrically corrected orthophotos. Additionally, the global position of the UAV is used to georeference the data. In all modes incremental progress of the resulting map can be viewed live by an operator on the ground. Obtained, up-to-date surface information will be a push forward to a variety of UAV applications. For the benefit of the community, source code is public at https://github.com/laxnpander/OpenREALM.