Light field-guided optical synthetic aperture imaging system on master–slave UAVs

Designing an optical aerial imaging system with high resolution and large fields of view (FoV) is a longstanding problem in remote sensing, astronomical observation, and geological exploration. In this paper, we propose a light field-guided optical synthetic aperture imaging system on master-slave unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This system consists of single-master UAV and multiple-slave UAVs to capture cross-scale multiview aerial images to stitch an aerial image and even a video with high resolution and large FoV. However, relative poses of UAVs change dynamically during the flight, which causes the inaccuracy of large-FoV image stitching. To address this problem, we convert image stitching as a novel-view synthesis problem on a large-FoV light field. Under this insight, we construct a 5D light field to cover FoVs of all slave UAVs via Gaussian splatting technique. Then we exploit a light field-guided synthetic aperture imaging scheme to generate the high-resolution image. Additionally, this scheme can be extended for large-FoV video generation. Experimental results on real-world scenes show that the proposed imaging system is capable of generating the accurate, large-FoV, high-resolution image sequences. Hence, we believe that this system has great potential in large-FoV high-resolution aerial imaging.