Optimized Views Photogrammetry: Precision Analysis and a Large-Scale Case Study in Qingdao

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) have become one of the widely used remote sensing platforms and played a critical role in the construction of smart cities. However, due to the complex environment in urban scenes, secure, and accurate data acquisition brings great challenges to 3-D modeling and scene updating. Optimal trajectory planning of UAVs and accurate data collection of onboard cameras are nontrivial issues in urban modeling. This study presents the principle of optimized views photogrammetry and verifies its precision and potential in large-scale 3-D modeling. Different from oblique photogrammetry, optimized views photogrammetry uses rough models to generate and optimize UAV trajectories, which is achieved through the consideration of model point reconstructability and view point redundancy. Based on the principle of optimized views photogrammetry, this study first conducts a precision analysis of 3-D models by using UAV images of optimized views photogrammetry and then executes a large-scale case study in the urban region of Qingdao City, China, to verify its engineering potential. By using GCPs for image orientation precision analysis and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds for model quality analysis, experimental results show that optimized views photogrammetry could construct stable image connection networks and could achieve comparable image orientation accuracy. Benefiting from the accurate image acquisition strategy, the quality of mesh models significantly improves, especially for urban areas with serious occlusions, in which 3 to 5 times of higher accuracy has been achieved. Besides, the case study in Qingdao City verifies that optimized views photogrammetry can be a reliable and powerful solution for the large-scale 3-D modeling in complex urban scenes.