An Indoor Location-Based Positioning System Using Stereo Vision with the Drone Camera

Stereo vision is used to reconstruct 3D information of the space by estimating the depth value from the simulation of human eyes. Spatial restoration can be used as a means of location estimation in an indoor area, which is impossible to accomplish using the relative location estimation technology, GPS. By mapping the real world in virtual space, it is feasible to clear the boundary between real space and virtual space. This paper presents a method to control the drone indoors through a positioning system using Structure from Motion algorithm (SfM). SfM calculates the relative relationship between cameras based on images to be acquired from various locations and obtains disparity to enable restoration of 3D space. First, the 3D virtual space is reconstructed using several photographs taken from an indoor environment. Second, the real-time drone position is determined by comparing the 3D virtual space camera with the image displayed on the drone camera. In this case, if the direction of the virtual camera used for 3D virtual space construction is the same as the amount of yaw rotation of the drone, it is possible to quickly find the same position as the image seen in the real drone camera in the virtual space. As a result, if the scale of the actual camera image and the virtual camera image is 1:1 matched, then it is possible to know that the drone is in the position of the virtual camera. The proposed indoor location-based drone controlling method can be applied to various drone applications such as group flight in an indoor environment because of its ability to fly the drone without the use of the traditional remote-control and flight trajectory programming.