AVSS 2011 demo session: Construction site monitoring from highly-overlapping MAV images

We present a concept for automatic construction site monitoring by taking into account 4D information (3D over time), that is acquired from highly-overlapping digital aerial images. On the one hand today's maturity of flying micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) enables a low-cost and an efficient image acquisition of high-quality data that maps construction sites entirely from many varying viewpoints. On the other hand, due to low-noise sensors and high redundancy in the image data, recent developments in 3D reconstruction workflows have benefited the automatic computation of accurate and dense 3D scene information. Having both an inexpensive high-quality image acquisition and an efficient 3D analysis workflow enables monitoring, documentation and visualization of observed sites over time with short intervals. Relating acquired 4D site observations, composed of color, texture, geometry over time, largely supports automated methods toward full scene understanding, the acquisition of both the change and the construction site's progress.