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[Display omitted] • Reconstruction of large point clouds with thermal data through an automatic method. • Minimization of the distance from aggregated thermal values to image information. • Massively parallel computing with GPU hardware for time-consuming tasks. • Thermal characterization of vegetation by detecting ground points. Thermal infrared (TIR) images acquired from Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAV) are gaining scientific interest in a wide variety of fields. However, the reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) point clouds utilizing consumer-grade TIR images presents multiple drawbacks as a consequence of low-resolution and induced aberrations. Consequently, these problems may lead photogrammetric techniques, such as Structure from Motion (SfM), to generate poor results. This work proposes the use of RGB point clouds estimated from SfM as the input for building thermal point clouds. For that purpose, RGB and thermal imagery are registered using the Enhanced Correlation Coefficient (ECC) algorithm after removing acquisition errors, thus allowing us to project TIR images into an RGB point cloud. Furthermore, we consider several methods to provide accurate thermal values for each 3D point. First, the occlusion problem is solved through two different approaches, so that points that are not visible from a viewing angle do not erroneously receive values from foreground objects. Then, we propose a flexible method to aggregate multiple thermal values considering the dispersion from such aggregation to the image samples. Therefore, it minimizes error measurements. A naive classification algorithm is then applied to the thermal point clouds as a case study for evaluating the temperature of vegetation and ground points. As a result, our approach builds thermal point clouds with up to 798,69% more point density than results from other commercial solutions. Moreover, it minimizes the build time by using parallel computing for time-consuming tasks. Despite obtaining larger point clouds, we report up to 96,73% less processing time per 3D point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reconstruction of 3D point clouds from image datasets is a time-consuming task that has been frequently solved by performing photogrammetric techniques on every data source. This work presents an approach to efficiently build large and dense point clouds from co-acquired images. In our case study, the sensors co-acquire visible as well as thermal and multispectral imagery. Hence, RGB point clouds are reconstructed with traditional methods, whereas the rest of the data sources with lower resolution and less identifiable features are projected into the first one, i.e., the most complete and dense. To this end, the mapping process is accelerated using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and multi-threading in the CPU (Central Processing Unit). The accurate colour aggregation in 3D points is guaranteed by taking into account the occlusion of foreground surfaces. Accordingly, our solution is shown to reconstruct much more dense point clouds than notable commercial software (286% on average), e.g., Pix4Dmapper and Agisoft Metashape, in much less time (− 70 % on average with respect to the best alternative). [Display omitted] • Fusion of large RGB point clouds with multispectral and thermal imagery. • Alignment of multiple RGB point clouds from different sensors. • GPU accelerated mapping of imagery into 3D RGB point clouds. • Occlusion-aware projection of information over point clouds from additional data sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]