Airborne Inspection using Single-Camera Interleaved Imagery

We propose an airborne inspection system which operates with a single camera. It provides live high-resolution detail images at low framerates for inspection, interleaved in time with several coarse-resolution overview images suitable for visual servoing. By defining the object of interest in 3D, the same pose estimation routine can be used for visual servoing and object tracking, which saves computation effort. Localization in 3D allows inspection from different perspectives without manual redefinition of the object of interest. Additionally, small accumulated localization errors of the image acquisition pipeline are corrected using correlation-based image stabilization. In our experiments, we show that the proposed method results in better image quality and higher frame-rates than the straight-forward approach of streaming wide fieldof-view high-resolution images. Additionally, we evaluate the timings of our interleaved image acquisition. Given the requirement of one detail image per second, we can capture a maximum of 6 additional overview images per second. This utilizes the available on-board processing power and transmission bandwidth best and is sufficient for simultaneous inspection and visual servoing.