Vision-based drone control for autonomous UAV cinematography

One of the most important aesthetic concepts in autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) cinematography is the UAV/Camera Motion Type (CMT), describing the desired UAV trajectory relative to a (still or moving) physical target/subject being filmed. Usually, for the drone to autonomously execute such a CMT and capture the desired shot in footage, the 3D states (positions/poses within the world) of both the UAV/camera and the target are required as input. However, the target’s 3D state is not typically known in non-staged settings. This paper proposes a novel framework for reformulating each desired CMT as a set of requirements that interrelate 2D visual information, UAV trajectory and camera orientation. Then, a set of CMT-specific vision-driven Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) UAV controllers can be implemented, by exploiting the above requirements to form suitable error signals. Such signals drive continuous adjustments to instant UAV motion parameters, separately at each captured video frame/time instance. The only inputs required for computing each error value are the current 2D pixel coordinates of the target’s on-frame bounding box, detectable by an independent, off-the-shelf, real-time, deep neural 2D object detector/tracker vision subsystem. Importantly, neither UAV nor target 3D states are required ever to be known or estimated, while no depth maps, target 3D models or camera intrinsic parameters are necessary. The method was implemented and successfully evaluated in a robotics simulator, by properly reformulating a set of standard, formalized UAV CMTs.