A prototype drone is presented that finds people in densely occluded forests fully autonomously.

Drone swarms can achieve tasks via collaboration that are impossible for single drones alone. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing is a signal processing technique that takes measurements from limited size sensors and computationally combines the data to mimic sensor apertures of much greater widths. Here we use SA sensing and propose an adaptive real-time particle swarm optimization (PSO) strategy for autonomous drone swarms to detect and track occluded targets in densely forested areas. Simulation results show that our approach achieved a maximum target visibility of 72% within 14 seconds. In comparison, blind sampling strategies resulted in only 51% visibility after 75 seconds and 19% visibility in 3 seconds for sequential brute force sampling and parallel sampling respectively. Our approach provides fast and reliable detection of occluded targets, and demonstrates the feasibility and efficiency of using swarm drones for search and rescue in areas that are not easily accessed by humans, such as forests and disaster sites.

Drones are becoming increasingly popular for remote sensing of landscapes in archeology, cultural heritage, forestry, and other disciplines. They are more efficient than airplanes for capturing small areas, of up to several hundred square meters. LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and photogrammetry have been applied together with drones to achieve 3D reconstruction. With airborne optical sectioning (AOS), we present a radically different approach that is based on an old idea: synthetic aperture imaging. Rather than measuring, computing, and rendering 3D point clouds or triangulated 3D meshes, we apply image-based rendering for 3D visualization. In contrast to photogrammetry, AOS does not suffer from inaccurate correspondence matches and long processing times. It is cheaper than LiDAR, delivers surface color information, and has the potential to achieve high sampling resolutions. AOS samples the optical signal of wide synthetic apertures (30–100 m diameter) with unstructured video images recorded from a low-cost camera drone to support optical sectioning by image integration. The wide aperture signal results in a shallow depth of field and consequently in a strong blur of out-of-focus occluders, while images of points in focus remain clearly visible. Shifting focus computationally towards the ground allows optical slicing through dense occluder structures (such as leaves, tree branches, and coniferous trees), and discovery and inspection of concealed artifacts on the surface.

We describe how a new and low-cost aerial scanning technique, airborne optical sectioning (AOS), can support ornithologists in nesting observation. After capturing thermal and color images during a seven minutes drone flight over a 40 × 12 m patch of the nesting site of Austria’s largest heron population, a total of 65 herons and 27 nests could be identified, classified, and localized in a sparse 3D reconstruction of the forest. AOS is a synthetic aperture imaging technique that removes occlusion caused by leaves and branches. It registers recorded images to a common 3D coordinate system to support the reconstruction and analysis of the entire forest volume, which is impossible with conventional 2D or 3D imaging techniques. The recorded data is published with open access.

Synthetic apertures find applications in many fields, such as radar, radio telescopes, microscopy, sonar, ultrasound, LiDAR, and optical imaging. They approximate the signal of a single hypothetical wide aperture sensor with either an array of static small aperture sensors or a single moving small aperture sensor. Common sense in synthetic aperture sampling is that a dense sampling pattern within a wide aperture is required to reconstruct a clear signal. In this article we show that there exists practical limits to both, synthetic aperture size and number of samples for the application of occlusion removal. This leads to an understanding on how to design synthetic aperture sampling patterns and sensors in a most optimal and practically efficient way. We apply our findings to airborne optical sectioning which uses camera drones and synthetic aperture imaging to computationally remove occluding vegetation or trees for inspecting ground surfaces.