FC-Vision: Real-Time Visibility-Aware Replanning for Occlusion-Free Aerial Target Structure Scanning in Unknown Environments

TL;DR

FC-Vision is a real-time framework for aerial target scanning that proactively prevents occlusions, significantly improving coverage and visibility in unknown environments without sacrificing efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel visibility-aware replanning method that explicitly enforces surface-visibility constraints and seamlessly integrates with existing UAV systems.

Findings

Maximum coverage gain of 55.32% achieved

Occlusion ratio reduced by 73.17%

Maintains real-time performance with moderate flight time increase

Abstract

Autonomous aerial scanning of target structures is crucial for practical applications, requiring online adaptation to unknown obstacles during flight. Existing methods largely emphasize collision avoidance and efficiency, but overlook occlusion-induced visibility degradation, severely compromising scanning quality. In this study, we propose FC-Vision, an on-the-fly visibility-aware replanning framework that proactively and safely prevents target occlusions while preserving the intended coverage and efficiency of the original plan. Our approach explicitly enforces dense surface-visibility constraints to regularize replanning behavior in real-time via an efficient two-level decomposition: occlusion-free viewpoint repair that maintains coverage with minimal deviation from the nominal scan intent, followed by segment-wise clean-sensing connection in 5-DoF space. A plug-in integration strategy is also presented to seamlessly interface FC-Vision with existing UAV scanning systems without architectural changes. Comprehensive simulation and real-world evaluations show that FC-Vision consistently improves scanning quality under unexpected occluders, delivering a maximum coverage gain of 55.32% and a 73.17% reduction in the occlusion ratio, while achieving real-time performance with a moderate increase in flight time. The source code will be made publicly available.