Comparison of Rolling Shutter Effects on Photogrametric Accuracy using UAV Platforms

Abstract

Within the UAV market, there exists two main camera types that come equipped to the aircraft to gather imagery. Traditionally global shutters, also known as manual shutters, have been used for UAV sensors. Global shutters capture the contents within their lens in one motion, which minimizes distortion when images are gathered while the aircraft is moving. Many new consumer UAVs are being equipped with rolling shutters due to their lower cost when compared to global shutters. Rolling shutter cameras capture imagery by scanning the lens from top to bottom non-instantaneously. This leads to distortion within the imagery when the aircraft captures images while in motion. To try and compensate for the poor-quality images produced by rolling shutter sensors several programs have been created to attempt to model out the distortion within captured imagery. One such program is Pix4D mapper. Pix4D claims to be able to process the imagery in such a way that imagery captured from a rolling shutter sensor would be comparable to imagery captured from a global shutter sensor.