Airborne imaging: Systems, deployments, practices and capabilities

This paper presents a functional implementation of an unmanned aerial vehicle complete with image acquisition payloads for the documentation and virtual reconstruction of cultural heritage sites. We discuss technological advances in unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as contemporary practices in implementation, which have evolved in the direction of reducing costs, enabling new functionalities, and emerging applications in cultural heritage fieldwork. These advances are the basis for the design and execution of our unmanned aircraft, which we develop to collect unique and comprehensive datasets in challenging acquisition scenarios at active cultural heritage sites. Our platform is able to perform visual imaging, using a variety of acquisition triggers and mechanisms to enable high-resolution in-plane site photogrammetry, oblique aerial examinations of large sites, and sequence acquisitions for use in structure from motion based volumetric reconstructions of specific areas of interest. This data is in turn suitable for exploration with or without volumetric post processing techniques using visual analysis techniques using interactive high resolution tiled display inspection environments.