Applications of UAV Photogrammetric Survey in Smart City and Smart Region

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, research on smart cities has received widespread attention from scholars around the world. Implementing smart city technology can provide a unified description of the three-dimensional space of the entire city, and accurately integrate and express various facilities underground, above ground, and indoors, thus forming a three-dimensional spatial framework that is consistent with the real world. How to quickly and accurately collect and express three-dimensional spatial information of various objects in the increasingly complex urban three-dimensional space has thus become an international frontier in the research and application of geographic spatial information science. The advantages of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), such as maneuverability, flexibility, and fast response, have led to UAV photogrammetry becoming one of the main technical methods of current geographic information data collection, playing an important role in fields such as geology, surveying, transportation, 3D cities, and national defense security. The deep integration of UAV photogrammetry into 5G, digital twin, and blockchain technology can promote the development of smart cities towards a higher level of “digital spatial foundation”. However, there are still some issues that need further research in the UAV photogrammetry-based construction of smart cities and regions, for example, high-precision real-scene 3D modeling and dynamic updates, multi-source data fusion and intelligent analysis, low-altitude route planning and airspace management, autonomous flight, and intelligent task scheduling.

This Special Issue welcomes contributions on the automatic control of UAVs in city scenes and effective extraction of geospatial information from different kinds of original data captured via UAV (e.g., multi-view images, 3D point clouds) for better smart city and smart region building. This Special Issue falls within the journal’s scope of remote sensing information extraction.

Topics may cover anything from UAV digital photogrammetry to more comprehensive themes in the field of urban remote sensing. This Special Issue thus welcomes original research on multisource data integration and processing (e.g., multispectral, hyperspectral, and thermal), multiscale approaches and studies focused on urban monitoring, and other related topics. Articles may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Autonomous UAV obstacle avoidance and flight in urban environments;
• UAV intelligent task scheduling and adaptive optimization in urban environments;
• High-precision real-scene 3D modeling and dynamic updates of urban scenes;
• Low-altitude route planning and airspace management;
• Multi-image robust matching;
• UAV image automatic aerial triangulation;
• UAV multi-source data fusion and intelligent analysis;
• UAV multi-source data object detection and recognition;
• Urban spatial analysis based on UAV;
• Rapid disaster response and emergency management in urban scenes based on UAV;
• Urban smart management based on UAV.

Prof. Dr. Ka Zhang
Guest Editor

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• structure from motion
• route planning
• airborne point cloud processing
• multi-source data fusion
• multi-source data processing
• object detection and recognition
• image matching
• 3D reconstruction