The VABENE Helicopter-borne Camera System with TIR extension as a reference platform for drone sensors

Kurzfassung

The VABENE Camera System is a multi-headed aerial imaging system designed for the EC135 helicopter. It comprises a Sensor-POD mounted on the skid and a powerful onboard computing unit located at the rear of the cabin. An LTE router and a directional radio allow aerial images and AI-based thematic maps to be transmitted directly to a ground station. An advanced inertial/GNSS system enables a precise, direct georeferencing of the images. Orthoprojected images are rendered and analysed on board before being downlinked, providing situation maps in real time at the operations centre on the ground. Depending on the flight height, extremely high ground resolutions in the millimetre range can be achieved with the integrated 150-megapixel RGB camera in the Sensor-POD. In addition, the SensorPOD contains a long wave infrared (LWIR) camera. Such a camera system might reveal camouflaged ground objects or mock-ups due to the RGB camera's high resolution and their signature in the LWIR band. Due to the high precision of the georeferencing of VABENE aerial image data, accurate locations of the objects can be determined. Using on-site ground control points that can be determined to within a few centimetres by SAR satellites and matched with their locations in the aerial images can improve the georeferencing precision even further. These benefits of the camera system can be used to evaluate RGB cameras and infrared (IR) sensors that are mounted and operated on drones. VABENE RGB images provide a resolution and georeferencing reference from a helicopter that can be compared to the results obtained by the drone sensors. Therefore, the performance of the drone sensors can be assessed.