{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,27]],"date-time":"2026-02-27T17:32:27Z","timestamp":1772213547127,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":35,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"5","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2021,3,5]],"date-time":"2021-03-05T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1614902400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100012166","name":"National Key Research and Development Program of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["2018YFB2100601"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2018YFB2100601"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100012166","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["61872023"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61872023"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Remote Sensing"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can capture high-quality aerial photos and have been widely used for large-scale urban 3D reconstruction. However, even with the help of commercial flight control software, it is still a challenging task for non-professional users to capture full-coverage aerial photos in complex urban environments, which normally leads to incomplete 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a novel path planning method for the high-quality aerial 3D reconstruction of urban scenes. The proposed approach first captures aerial photos, following an initial path to generate a coarse 3D model as prior knowledge. Then, 3D viewpoints with constrained location and orientation are generated and evaluated, according to the completeness and accuracy of the corresponding visible regions of the prior model. Finally, an optimized path is produced by smoothly connecting the optimal viewpoints. We perform an extensive evaluation of our method on real and simulated data sets, in comparison with a state-of-the-art method. The experimental results indicate that the optimized trajectory generated by our method can lead to a significant boost in the performance of aerial 3D urban reconstruction.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs13050989","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,3,5]],"date-time":"2021-03-05T05:03:15Z","timestamp":1614920595000},"page":"989","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":34,"title":["Sampling-Based Path Planning for High-Quality Aerial 3D Reconstruction of Urban Scenes"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"13","author":[{"given":"Feihu","family":"Yan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China"}]},{"given":"Enyong","family":"Xia","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5450-8131","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhaoxin","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China"}]},{"given":"Zhong","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,3,5]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Boonpook, W., Tan, Y., Liu, H., Zhao, B., and He, L. (2018). UAV-BASED 3D Urban Environment Monitoring. ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spat. Inf. Sci., 37\u201343.","DOI":"10.5194\/isprs-annals-IV-3-37-2018"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"111","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ijtst.2017.02.001","article-title":"Unmanned Aerial Aircraft Systems for transportation engineering: Current practice and future challenges","volume":"5","author":"Barmpounakis","year":"2016","journal-title":"Int. J. Transp. Sci. Technol."},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"693","DOI":"10.1007\/s11119-012-9274-5","article-title":"The application of small unmanned aerial systems for precision agriculture: A review","volume":"13","author":"Zhang","year":"2012","journal-title":"Precis. Agric."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Nikolic, J., Burri, M., Rehder, J., Leutenegger, S., Huerzeler, C., and Siegwart, R. (2013, January 2\u20139). A UAV system for inspection of industrial facilities. Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/AERO.2013.6496959"},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"269","DOI":"10.1177\/0278364917702237","article-title":"The Zurich urban micro aerial vehicle dataset","volume":"36","author":"Majdik","year":"2017","journal-title":"Int. J. Robot. Res."},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"889","DOI":"10.1109\/TPAMI.2011.172","article-title":"High Accuracy and Visibility-Consistent Dense Multiview Stereo","volume":"34","author":"Vu","year":"2012","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell."},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"896","DOI":"10.1016\/j.cag.2013.07.003","article-title":"Automatic urban modeling using volumetric reconstruction with surface graph cuts","volume":"37","author":"Demir","year":"2013","journal-title":"Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"84","DOI":"10.1016\/j.cag.2015.07.004","article-title":"Reconstructing building mass models from UAV images","volume":"54","author":"Li","year":"2016","journal-title":"Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3069","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2017.2778249","article-title":"Efficient VR and AR Navigation Through Multiperspective Occlusion Management","volume":"24","author":"Wu","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_10","unstructured":"Seitz, S.M., Curless, B., Diebel, J., Scharstein, D., and Szeliski, R. (2006, January 17\u201322). A Comparison and Evaluation of Multi-View Stereo Reconstruction Algorithms. Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, New York, NY, USA."},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"6880","DOI":"10.3390\/rs5126880","article-title":"Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for High-Resolution Reconstruction of Topography: The Structure from Motion Approach on Coastal Environments","volume":"5","author":"Mancini","year":"2013","journal-title":"Remote Sens."},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Leibe, B., Matas, J., Sebe, N., and Welling, M. (2016). Pixelwise View Selection for Unstructured Multi-View Stereo. Computer Vision\u2014ECCV 2016, Springer International Publishing.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-46454-1"},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sch\u00f6nberger, J.L., Zheng, E., Pollefeys, M., and Frahm, J.M. (2016, January 11\u201314). Pixelwise View Selection for Unstructured Multi-View Stereo. Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-46487-9_31"},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Roberts, M., Shah, S., Dey, D., Truong, A., Sinha, S.N., Kapoor, A., Hanrahan, P., and Joshi, N. (2017, January 22\u201329). Submodular Trajectory Optimization for Aerial 3D Scanning. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, Venice, Italy.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICCV.2017.569"},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1145\/3233794","article-title":"Plan3D: Viewpoint and Trajectory Optimization for Aerial Multi-View Stereo Reconstruction","volume":"38","author":"Hepp","year":"2018","journal-title":"ACM Trans. Graph."},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Sch\u00f6nberger, J.L., and Frahm, J.M. (2016, January 27\u201330). Structure-from-Motion Revisited. Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Las Vegas, NV, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/CVPR.2016.445"},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"177:1","DOI":"10.1145\/2816795.2818075","article-title":"Autoscanning for Coupled Scene Reconstruction and Proactive Object Analysis","volume":"34","author":"Xu","year":"2015","journal-title":"Acm Trans. Graph."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wu, S., Sun, W., Long, P., Huang, H., Cohen-Or, D., Gong, M., Deussen, O., and Chen, B. (2014). Quality-Driven Poisson-Guided Autoscanning. ACM Trans. Graph., 33.","DOI":"10.1145\/2661229.2661242"},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"128","DOI":"10.1111\/arcm.12078","article-title":"Image-Based Modelling from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Photogrammetry: An Effective, Low-Cost Tool for Archaeological Applications","volume":"57","year":"2015","journal-title":"Archaeometry"},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mohammed, F., Idries, A., Mohamed, N., Al-Jaroodi, J., and Jawhar, I. (2014, January 27\u201330). UAVs for smart cities: Opportunities and challenges. Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), Orlando, FL, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICUAS.2014.6842265"},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Hartley, R.I., and Zisserman, A. (2004). Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision, Cambridge University Press. [2nd ed.].","DOI":"10.1017\/CBO9780511811685"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1309","DOI":"10.1109\/TRO.2016.2624754","article-title":"Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: Toward the Robust-Perception Age","volume":"32","author":"Cadena","year":"2016","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Robot."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"292","DOI":"10.20965\/jrm.2011.p0292","article-title":"3D Terrain Reconstruction by Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Using SIFT-Based Monocular SLAM","volume":"23","author":"Suzuki","year":"2011","journal-title":"J. Robot. Mechatron."},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Teixeira, L., and Chli, M. (June, January 29). Real-time local 3D reconstruction for aerial inspection using superpixel expansion. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Singapore.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICRA.2017.7989530"},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Kriegel, S., Rink, C., Bodenm\u00fcller, T., Narr, A., and Hirzinger, G. (2012, January 7\u201312). Next-Best-Scan Planning for Autonomous 3D Modeling. Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE\/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Vilamoura-Algarve, Portugal.","DOI":"10.1109\/IROS.2012.6385624"},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Newcombe, R.A., Izadi, S., Hilliges, O., Molyneaux, D., Kim, D., Davison, A.J., Kohi, P., Shotton, J., Hodges, S., and Fitzgibbon, A. (2011, January 26\u201329). KinectFusion: Real-time dense surface mapping and tracking. Proceedings of the 2011 10th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, Basel, Switzerland.","DOI":"10.1109\/ISMAR.2011.6092378"},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Peng, C., and Isler, V. (2019, January 20\u201324). Adaptive View Planning for Aerial 3D Reconstruction. Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, QC, Canada.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICRA.2019.8793532"},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Smith, N., Moehrle, N., Goesele, M., and Heidrich, W. (2018). Aerial Path Planning for Urban Scene Reconstruction: A Continuous Optimization Method and Benchmark. ACM Trans. Graph., 37.","DOI":"10.1145\/3272127.3275010"},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"225","DOI":"10.3390\/s18010225","article-title":"Rapid 3D Reconstruction for Image Sequence Acquired from UAV Camera","volume":"18","author":"Qu","year":"2018","journal-title":"Sensors"},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Rublee, E., Rabaud, V., Konolige, K., and Bradski, G. (2011, January 6\u201313). ORB: An efficient alternative to SIFT or SURF. Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Computer Vision, Barcelona, Spain.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICCV.2011.6126544"},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1255","DOI":"10.1109\/TRO.2017.2705103","article-title":"ORB-SLAM2: An Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras","volume":"33","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Robot."},{"key":"ref_32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"914","DOI":"10.1109\/TVCG.2012.34","article-title":"Efficient and Flexible Sampling with Blue Noise Properties of Triangular Meshes","volume":"18","author":"Corsini","year":"2012","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph."},{"key":"ref_33","unstructured":"Kazhdan, M., Bolitho, M., and Hoppe, H. (2006, January 26\u201328). Poisson Surface Reconstruction. Proceedings of the Fourth Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP \u201906), Cagliari, Italy."},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"73","DOI":"10.1016\/S0303-2647(97)01708-5","article-title":"Ant colonies for the travelling salesman problem\u2014ScienceDirect","volume":"43","author":"Dorigo","year":"1997","journal-title":"Biosystems"},{"key":"ref_35","first-page":"163","article-title":"ACO Algorithms for the Traveling Salesman Problem","volume":"4","author":"Dorigo","year":"1999","journal-title":"Evol. Algorithms Eng. Comput. Sci."}],"container-title":["Remote Sensing"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2072-4292\/13\/5\/989\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T05:33:23Z","timestamp":1760160803000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2072-4292\/13\/5\/989"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2021,3,5]]},"references-count":35,"journal-issue":{"issue":"5","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,3]]}},"alternative-id":["rs13050989"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/rs13050989","relation":{},"ISSN":["2072-4292"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2072-4292","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2021,3,5]]}}}