Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS) is a wide synthetic-aperture imaging technique that employs manned or unmanned aircraft, to sample images within large (synthetic aperture) areas from above occluded volumes, such as forests. Based on the poses of the aircraft during capturing, these images are computationally combined to integral images by light-field technology. These integral images suppress strong occlusion and reveal targets that remain hidden in single recordings.
| Single Images | Airborne Optical Sectioning |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Source: Video on YouTube | FLIR
This repository contains software modules for drone-based search and rescue applications with airborne optical sectioning, as discussed in our publications. They are made available under a dual licence model.
Please refer to:
- AOS Data: Summarized sources of simulated an real AOS data.
- AOS Simulation: Several options for simulating AOS and pre-computed simulated training data.
- AOS for DJI: Our DJI compatible AOS app.
- AOS for Drone Swarms: Our basic research on applying AOS to drone swarms.
- AOS for Own Projects: Source code supporting your own AOS projects.
- AOS Groundstation: Software to operate single or multiple drones from a PC.
This research is supported by variaty of sponsors. See news for latest updates.
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ing. habil. Oliver Bimber
Johannes Kepler University Linz
Institute of Computer Graphics
Altenberger Straße 69
Computer Science Building
3rd Floor, Room 0302
4040 Linz, Austria
Phone: +43-732-2468-6631 (secretary: -6630)
Web: www.jku.at/cg
Email: oliver.bimber@jku.at
- Austrian Science Funds (FWF)
- German Science Funds (DFG)
- State of Upper Austria (OÖ)
- Nationalstiftung für Forschung, Technologie und Entwicklung (FTE)
- Linz Institute of Technology (LIT)
- German Aerospace Center (DLR)
- Upper Austrian Fire Brigade Association (OÖLFV)
- Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying (BEV)
News (see also Press)
- 09/27/2024: Stereoscopic Depth Perception Through Foliage accepted for publication in Nature Scientific Reports.
- 7/20/2024: AOS Groundstation for controlling single and multiple drones available: See Source Code
- 7/09/2024: AOS featured in Scientific American: See Article
- 6/21/2024: All Field-Experiments with our Drone Swarm: See Video Playlist and AOS for Swarms
- 4/29/2024: First Field-Experiment with Drone Swarm: See AOS for Swarms and Air-to-Air Video Recording
- 4/8/2024: AOS data sources summarized: See AOS Data
- 3/19/2024: Waypoint planning for swarms: See AOS for Swarms
- 3/8/2024: AOS on TV: Marys Magazin (ORF2, ARD Aplha).
- 2/29/2024: Simulated AOS training data made available: See AOS Simulation
- 2/14/2024: New image fusion approach presented (with first results on wildfire monitoring): See publications
- 1/19/2024: Real-time map visualization of swarms: See AOS for Swarms
- 12/25/2023: DL-based fusion of multispectral integral and single images: See publications
- 11/9/2023: Stereoscopic AOS: First-person-view (FPV) stereoscopic AOS visualization supported for DJI (via stereoscopic HMDs attached to the remote controls).
- 10/24/2023: New findings on stereoscopic depth perception through foliage: See publications
- 10/31/2023: New research project AOSonFire started (early wildfire detection using AOS). Together with Upper Austrian Fire Brigade Headquarters.
- 09/05/2023: Synthetic Aperture Anomaly Imaging published in J. Remote Sensing. See publications
- 08/3/23: Behind-the-paper story of new Nature Com. Eng. article on AOS drone swarm strategies.
- 06/01/23: Additional research grants for AOSonFire: Airborne Optical Sectioning for Early Wildfire Detection. In collaboration with Upper Austrian Fire Brigade Headquarters.
- 05/25/23: Nature Communications Engineering paper accepted. See publications (Synthetic Aperture Sensing for Occlusion Removal with Drone Swarms)
- 04/24/2023: AOS covered in April issues of Drones Magazin and Drohnen Magazin
- 03/29/2023: AOS at AERO Drones. See AOS at AERODrones, Hall A2, Booth 113.
- 03/01/2023: New Weave (FWF&DFG) funded basic research project on AOS for moving targets granted. In collaboration with German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg.
- 02/08/2023: DJI SDK 5 support (Mavic 3T, etc.) and new app with real-time anomaly detection. See AOS for DJI
- 12/30/2022: First AOS approach towards drone swarms for autonomous and adaptive sampling. See publications (Synthetic Aperture Sensing for Occlusion Removal with Drone Swarms)
- 11/29/2022: Study on state-of-the-art color anomaly detectors suitable for through-foliage detection and tracking. See publications (Evaluation of Color Anomaly Detection in Multispectral Images For Synthetic Aperture Sensing)
- 07/28/2022: Inverse Airborne Optical Sectioning -- through-foilage tracking with a single, conventional, hovering (stationary) drone. See publications (Inverse Airborne Optical Sectioning)
- 06/13/2022: DJI Enterprise Systems with Thermal Imaging supported See AOS for DJI
- 04/25/2022: Through-Foliage Tracking with Airborne Optical Sectioning pubisled in Science Partner Journal of Remote Sensing. See publications (Through-Foliage Tracking with Airborne Optical Sectioning)
- 03/22/2022: AOS for DJI released See AOS for DJI
- 03/09/2022: Combined Person Classification with Airborne Optical Sectioning published in Nature Scientific Reports
- 11/29/2021: Our recent work, Acceleration-Aware Path Planning with Waypoints has been published. See publications (Acceleration-Aware Path Planning with Waypoints)
- 06/23/2021: Science Robotics paper appeared. See publications (Autonomous Drones for Search and Rescue in Forests)
- 5/31/2021: New combined people classifer outbeats classical people classifers significantly. See publications (Combined People Classification with Airborne Optical Sectioning)
- 04/15/2021: First AOS experiments with DJI M300RTK reveals remarkable results (much better than with our OktoXL 6S12, due to higher GPS precission and better IR camera/stabilizer).
- Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Sigrid Strand, Daniel, Mehrwald, Dmitriy Shutin, Oliver Bimber, An Autonomous Drone Swarm for Detecting and Tracking Anomalies among Dense Vegetation, under review (2024)
- Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Sigrid Strand, Dmitriy Shutin, Oliver Bimber, Reciprocal Visibility for Guided Occlusion Removal With Drones, IEEE Geosci. Remote Sens. Lett. 21, 1 – 5 (2024).
- Mohamed Youssef and Oliver Bimber, Fusion of Single and Integral Multispectral Aerial Images, Remote Sens., 16(4), 673, (2024)
- Robert Kerschner, Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Rafal Mantiuk, Oliver Bimber, Stereoscopic Depth Perception Through Foliage, Nature Scientific Reports 14, 23056 (2024).
- Julia Pöschl, Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization for through-foliage target detection with drone swarms (2023)
- Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan and Oliver Bimber, Synthetic Aperture Anomaly Imaging for Through-Foliage Target Detection, Remote Sensing, Volume 15, Number 18, (2023)
- Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Indrajit Kurmi and Oliver Bimber, Drone swarm strategy for the detection and tracking of occluded targets in complex environments, Nature Communications Engineering 2, 55, https://doi.org/10.1038/s44172-023-00104-0, (2023)
- Francis Seits, Indrajit Kurmi, and Oliver Bimber, Evaluation of Color Anomaly Detection in Multispectral Images For Synthetic Aperture Sensing, Eng, 3(4), 541-553, (2022)
- Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Indrajit Kurmi and Oliver Bimber, Inverse Airborne Optical Sectioning, Drones, Volume 6, Number 9, (2022)
- Drones (open access and online version)
- arXiv (pre-print)
- Data:
- Video S1: Manual motion parameter estimation.
- Video S2: Automatic motion parameter estimation (example 1).
- Video S3: Automatic motion parameter estimation (example 2).
- Francis Seits, Indrajit Kurmi, Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Rudolf Ortner and Oliver Bimber, On the Role of Field of View for Occlusion Removal with Airborne Optical Sectioning (2022)
- Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl and Oliver Bimber, Through-Foliage Tracking with Airborne Optical Sectioning, Journal of Remote Sensing, Volume 2022, Article ID 9812765, (2022)
- Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, and Oliver Bimber, Combined Person Classification with Airborne Optical Sectioning, Nature Scientific Reports, 12, Article number: 3804, 2022
- Rudolf Ortner, Indrajit Kurmi, and Oliver Bimber, Acceleration-Aware Path Planning with Waypoints. Drones. 5, no. 4: 143 (2021).
- David C. Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi, and Oliver Bimber, Autonomous Drones for Search and Rescue in Forests, Science Robotics 6(55), eabg1188, https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abg1188, (2021)
- David C. Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi, and Oliver Bimber, Search and rescue with airborne optical sectioning, Nature Machine Intelligence 2, 783-790, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-00261-3 (2020)
- Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, and Oliver Bimber, Pose Error Reduction for Focus Enhancement in Thermal Synthetic Aperture Visualization, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/LGRS.2021.3051718 (2021).
- Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, and Oliver Bimber, Fast automatic visibility optimization for thermal synthetic aperture visualization, IEEE Geosci. Remote Sens. Lett. https://doi.org/10.1109/LGRS.2020.2987471 (2020).
- David C. Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi, and Oliver Bimber, Airborne Optical Sectioning for Nesting Observation. Sci Rep 10, 7254, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-63317-9 (2020).
- Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, and Oliver Bimber, Thermal airborne optical sectioning. Remote Sensing. 11, 1668, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11141668, (2019).
- Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, and Oliver Bimber, A statistical view on synthetic aperture imaging for occlusion removal. IEEE Sensors J. 19, 9374 – 9383 (2019).
- Oliver Bimber, Indrajit Kurmi, and David C. Schedl, Synthetic aperture imaging with drones. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. 39, 8 – 15 (2019).
- Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, and Oliver Bimber, Airborne optical sectioning. Journal of Imaging. 4, 102 (2018).
This repository contains software modules for drone-based search and rescue applications with airborne optical sectioning, as discussed in our publications. They are made available under a dual licence model.