CONSTRUCT: Construction Site Monitoring and Change Detection using UAVs

The goal of the project is to develop methods for modeling and surveying large construction sites. The project will make use of unmanned aerial vehicles and existing stationary or pan-tilt zoom cameras at the construction site. The goal is to provide accurate 3D models on a regular basis of the whole site. This will generate a 4D data set (3D+time). This data can then be used for documentation, visualization (we will use a mobile augmented reality system to overlay e.g. the plan or a model of the building) as well as measurement (e.g., how much material has been transported). From a scientific point of view we will have to solve following tasks:

• Dense 3D reconstruction from highly overlapping data, we will use variational methods implemented on the GPU.
• Accurate registration of subsequent models over time. Since the 3D reconstruction is changing (per definition) the method needs to handle this. This is an instance of the highly relevant 3D model updating problem.
• Integration of multiple camera sources. Using the 3D model and additional cameras poses the problem of localization of the additional cameras with respect to the 3D model which is again an instance the registration problem.
• Development of a handheld AR platform for visualization. In order to use AR technology the pose of the platform with respect to the model and the reconstruction needs to be determined.