FC-Vision: Real-Time Visibility-Aware Replanning for Occlusion-Free Aerial Target Structure Scanning in Unknown Environments

Read full text
Authors: Feng Chen, Yang Xu, Shaojie Shen
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Autonomous aerial scanning of target structures is crucial for practical applications, requiring online adaptation to unknown obstacles during flight. Existing methods largely emphasize collision avoidance and efficiency, but overlook occlusion-induced visibility degradation, severely compromising scanning quality. This study proposes FC-Vision, an on-the-fly visibility-aware replanning framework that proactively and safely prevents target occlusions while preserving full target coverage and efficiency of the original plan. Our approach explicitly enforces dense surface-visibility constraints to regularize replanning behavior in real-time via an efficient two-level decomposition: occlusion-free viewpoint repair that maintains coverage with minimal deviation from the nominal scan, followed by segment-wise clean-sensing connection in 5-DoF space. A plug-in integration strategy is also presented to seamlessly interface \textbf{FC-Vision} with existing UAV scanning systems without architectural changes. Comprehensive simulation and real-world evaluations show that \textbf{FC-Vision} consistently improves scanning quality under unexpected occluders, delivering a maximum coverage gain of 55.32% and a 73.17% reduction in the occlusion ratio, while achieving real-time performance with a moderate increase in flight time. The code has been released at https://github.com/FC-Family/FC-Vision.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Robotic Path Planning Algorithms 3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage Advanced Vision and Imaging

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
14 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint