Faucon noir UAV project development of a set of tools for managing, visualizing and mosaicing centimetric UAV images

Eager for greater flexibility, and lesser costs, we are often tempted to acquire high-resolution data with home-made acquisition systems. However, this approach cannot benefit from usual tools to tackle problems such as image navigation within a large flow of very high resolution pictures, data completion and image mosaicing of small patches of the overflown area. This article presents the tools suite our laboratory has developed. In our case, we have developed homemade quad-rotor for low altitude imagery, equipped with up to three compact cameras on a stabilized platform. This configuration represents 2800 images at a ground resolution of 2 to 5 centimeters for each 20 minute flight. In order to take advantage of this flow of data, we needed a relevant set of tools for optimal acquisition and exploitation of the images.