UAV-Assisted Image Acquisition: 3D UAV Trajectory Design and Camera Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 3D UAV trajectory optimization method for oblique image acquisition of ground targets, minimizing travel distance while ensuring image resolution constraints are met.

Contribution

It formulates a new 3D UAV trajectory problem as a modified traveling salesman problem and proposes an iterative algorithm for efficient suboptimal solutions.

Findings

The proposed algorithm reduces UAV travel distance significantly.

It effectively meets image resolution constraints.

Numerical results validate the algorithm's efficiency and effectiveness.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted oblique image acquisition system where a UAV is dispatched to take images of multiple ground targets (GTs). To study the three-dimensional (3D) UAV trajectory design for image acquisition, we first propose a novel UAV-assisted oblique photography model, which characterizes the image resolution with respect to the UAV's 3D image-taking location. Then, we formulate a 3D UAV trajectory optimization problem to minimize the UAV's traveling distance subject to the image resolution constraints. The formulated problem is shown to be equivalent to a modified 3D traveling salesman problem with neighbourhoods, which is NP-hard in general. To tackle this difficult problem, we propose an iterative algorithm to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution efficiently, by alternately optimizing the UAV's 3D image-taking waypoints and its visiting order for the GTs. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the UAV's traveling distance as compared to various benchmark schemes, while meeting the image resolution requirement.