Sewer Inlet Localization in UAV Image Clouds: Improving Performance with Multiview Detection

Sewer and drainage infrastructure are often not as well catalogued as they should be, considering the immense investment they represent. In this work, we present a fully automatic framework for localizing sewer inlets from image clouds captured from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The framework exploits the high image overlap of UAV imaging surveys with a multiview approach to improve detection performance. The framework uses a Viola–Jones classifier trained to detect sewer inlets in aerial images with a ground sampling distance of 3–3.5 cm/pixel. The detections are then projected into three-dimensional space where they are clustered and reclassified to discard false positives. The method is evaluated by cross-validating results from an image cloud of 252 UAV images captured over a 0.57-km2 study area with 228 sewer inlets. Compared to an equivalent single-view detector, the multiview approach improves both recall and precision, increasing average precision from 0.65 to 0.73. The source code and case study data are publicly available for reuse.