Our new scientific article answers… Since the inception of DataFromSky we were actively collaborating with academics to analyse traffic and design safer transportations systems for a better future. Beside the development of the processes to extract and analyse trajectories of the vehicles from aerial videos, we also aimed to analyse the accuracy of our approach itself.
In collaboration with Faculty of Information Technology and Faculty of Civil Engineering at Brno University of Technology, we are working to analyse the accuracy of object position estimation and accuracy of extracted trajectories and their properties when estimated by a low flying UAVs. (see our news from a year ago).
In the previous year, we have developed a tool to assess the accuracy of object position estimation algorithm similar to the one used in DataFromSky. We used this tool to estimate the accuracy of object position estimation from aerial imagery captured by a general-purpose drone in various scenes and compared the results with spatial data collected with an industrial grade GPS sensor. A part of this research and its results have been recently published in special issue on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in peer-reviewed scientific journal International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology and is already available for pre-press preview at the following link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijtst.2017.02.002
The article provides an insight into the nature of the accuracy of position estimation and properties of uncertainty propagation through the algorithm with respect to various aspects of the camera, scene and its setup. The additional contribution of article is to provide a guiding tool to properly choose and set the drone pose and camera to achieve the desired accuracy of the position estimation of objects in the traffic scene prior the capture of the scene itself.
Picture: “Spatial visualisation of the resulting position estimation error in metres caused by non-linear deformation, across the camera field of view. The 4 red crosses represent the images of the landmarks. The camera is situated at position (0,0,100)[m] looking directly down.”