Drone-based-building-assessment

Project - "Identification of salient structural elements from buildings using UAVs"

The project aims to extract information such as planShape/Area, Storey and window count, their height and so on of the buildings from the camera feed through drone. It is a part of IHub - Mobility Research at IIIT Hyderabad.

Objectives of Pilot Study:

To identify salient structural elements in buildings from RGB images captured using a UAV.

Number of windows
Number of storeys
Storey height (Uniform/varied storey heights)
Building Plan estimation

Dataset:

We have made our own custom dataset by capturing buildings on IIIT-H campus through a drone. In addition, we have also used the open-source zju_facade dataset to train our models. IIIT-H campus window dataset can be found here.

For window detection task (The ground truths are bounding boxes shown in red)

For plan-shape/area (The ground truths are segmented masks in white)

Progress till now:

Please find our current progress in the following presentation. Presentation Link

Directory Structure:

win_det_heatmaps: It contains estimation of window/storey parameters(window detection and post_processing module, window/storey count, storey heights).
planShape: Contains Semantic segmentation and area calculation of roof-tops.

Window detection

Shufflenet inference

As shown in the above fig., we have the detected windows from the model inference(Shufflenet from win_det_heatmaps). However, we see that some windows still go undetected. Hence, we have a designed a post-processing module.

Post-processing module:

We take the detected windows as templates and run them over the horizontal patch in the image. We try to match this template in the patch and detect the windows which we were previously not detected.

Model inference(left), Horizontal Patch (middle), Template (right)

Post processing results

As shown in the fig. above, the post processing module detects all windows successfully.

Storey/Building height estimation:

As shown in the fig. above, we make use of Depth(D), focal length of the camera(f), height of the UAV(H) and image coordinates(x,y) are used to map the coordinates of each detected window from the image to a 2D vertical plane using triangulation.

2D Vertical Plane Mapping(Before and After NMS)

The above vertical plane helps us get an estimate of distance between 2 consecutive vertical windows. Although we have the imaginary vertical plane(scaled in cm), we cannot use this directly to estimate storey heights. This is because the vertical plane also includes the ground plane. Due to this, the estimated height increases by the proportion of ground plane pixels and therefore it needs to be accounted for. As it depends on the start frame and also the camera’s FOV, it is difficult to generalize it in different scenarios, hence we rely on 3D reconstruction for this.

1 unit (mesh) = ∇Wij /∇wij

where ∇Wij represents the distance between consecutive windows in cm, estimated from Plane Mapping Approach whereas ∇wij represents the distance between same two windows in the units of mesh from SFM reconstruction

Now, we use the unit scale to estimate the building/storey heights in the 3D reconstruction.

Plan Shape/Area Estimation :

We use RefineNet from building-footprint-segmentation and fine-tune it on our dataset consisting of GoogleEarth & IIIT-H campus(captured using UAV), which consists of around 200 images.

Inference

Sample results on 4 campus buildings from the dataset - Nilgiri(top-left), Bakul(bottom-left), Aarogya(top-right), Car Service Station(bottom-right)

Now, we estimate the area(in m²) from the contour Area of the segmented building mask.
Area(in m²) = Contour Area(in pixels)*(D/f)²
D: Depth(in m) f: focalLength(in pixels)

Publications:

-> Dhruv Patel, Shivani Chepuri, Sarvesh Thakur, Harikumar Kandath, Ravi Kiran S, K. Madhava Krishna, “Identifying and estimating salient parameters of a building using UAV based remote sensing”, submitted to IEEE International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS) 2022.

Objectives for next phase:

-> Distance between adjacent buildings
-> Parapets, objects on roof-top
-> Staircase exit and water tanks on the roof-top
-> Cracks on the surface wall and roof-top
-> Lifelines (electric and water supply, sewage pipes)
-> Toppling/falling hazard
-> Building level (flat or tilted ground)

Project Team:

Dhruv Patel - Project Associate, Robotics Research Centre(RRC), IIIT Hyderabad
Shivani Chepuri - MS Student, IIIT Hyderabad
Sarvesh Thakur - MEng Robotics, University of Maryland

Advisors:
Prof. Madhava Krishna (Head & Professor, RRC, IIIT Hyderabad)
Dr. Harikumar Kandath (Assistant Professor, IIIT-Hyderabad)
Dr. Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla (Assistant Professor, IIIT-Hyderabad)

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