Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Image Dataset of the Built Environment for 3D reconstruction (UAVID3D)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) provide increased access to unique types of urban imagery traditionally not available. Advanced machine learning and computer vision techniques when applied to UAV RGB image data can be used for automated extraction of building asset information and if applied to UAV thermal imagery data can detect potential thermal anomalies. However,  these UAV datasets are not easily available to researchers, thereby creating a barrier to accelerating research in this area. 

To assist researchers with added data to develop machine learning algorithms, we present UAVID3D (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Image Dataset of the Built Environment for 3D reconstruction). The raw images for our dataset were recorded with a Zenmuse XT2 visual (RGB) and a FLIR Tau 2 (thermal, https://flir.netx.net/file/asset/15598/original/) camera on a DJI Mavic 2 pro drone (https://www.dji.com/matrice-200-series). The thermal camera is factory calibrated. All data is organized and structured to comply with FAIR principles, i.e. being findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. It is publicly available and can be downloaded from the Zenodo data repository. 

RGB images were recorded during UAV fly-overs of two different commercial buildings in Northern California. In addition,  thermographic images were recorded during 2 subsequent UAV fly-overs of the same two buildings. UAV flights were recorded at flight heights between 60–80 m above ground with a flight speed of 1 m s and contain GPS information. All images were recorded during drone flights on May 10, 2021 between 8:45 am and 10:30 am and on May 19, 2021 between 2:15 pm and 4:30 pm. Outdoor air temperatures on these two days during the flights were between 78 and 83 degree fahrenheit and  between 58 and 65 degree fahrenheit respectively. 

For the RGB flights, UAV path was planned and captured using an orbital flight plan in PIX4D capture at normal flight speed and overlap angle of 10 degree. Thermal images were captured by manual flights approximately 5 m away from each building facade. Due to the high overlap of images,  similarities from feature points identified in each image can be extracted to conduct photogrammetry. Photogrammetry allows estimation of the three-dimensional coordinates of points on an object in a generated 3D space involving measurements made on images taken with a high overlap rate. Photogrammetry can be used to create a 3D point cloud model of the recorded region. UAVID3D dataset is a series of compressed archive files totaling 21GB. Useful pipelines to process these images can be found at these two repositories https://github.com/LBNL-ETA/a3dbr, and https://github.com/LBNL-ETA/AutoBFE

This work was supported by the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Building Technologies Program, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.