A fast key frame extraction algorithm and an accurate feature matching method for 3D reconstruction from aerial video

In this paper, we present a fast method of key frame selection and an accurate feature point matching method for 3D reconstruction through the control of quadrotor. The quadrotor is controlled to fly at a fixed altitude and the gimbal camera has always been a downward direction. Therefore, the additional information of the quadrotor could be easily added to the 3D reconstruction process. As a result, we find a fast method to select key frames and an optimized matching method through the geometric constraints of the flight path and direction. The method is mainly to improve the efficiency of key frame selection and to get more accurate matching points. The advantage of our approach is to combine the two processes between video capture and video processing by adding flight control to the 3D scene reconstruction method. Therefore, it can use less time to complete the entire reconstruction task. The proposed approach is tested by quadrotor platform. Experiment results show that our method can greatly reduce the key frame selection time and get more matching points at the same accuracy.