Monocular passive event-based range-finding of airborne objects using the Scheimpflug principle

Abstract

Passive 3D sensing is increasingly critical for early detection and tracking of small aerial vehicles (UAVs), where traditional active ranging can be tactically undesirable. We present SCHeimpflug for Optical Ranging TechnologY (SCHORTY), a single-aperture passive and active ranging architecture that exploits the Scheimpflug principle to encode range along a tilted object space plane by tilting the sensor relative to the imaging optics. SCHORTY requires only a one-time geometric calibration to map pixel coordinates to range and is inherently sensor and waveband agnostic. We implement SCHORTY using both a visible frame-based camera and an event-based camera (EBC) with closely matched pixel sizes for comparable horizontal resolutions and range binning. Controlled flights of an octocopter and a fixed-wing UAV equipped with GPS provide ground truth distances out to 1.1 km. Experimental results show that SCHORTY achieves deterministic range assignment limited primarily by the projected pixel size, which grows squared distance, while avoiding computationally intensive inverse reconstructions common in coded aperture and PSF engineered systems. In the EBC configuration, EBC-SCHORTY inherently suppresses static background and emphasizes motion, improving UAV detectability in cluttered natural scenes and under turbulence and motion blur. Additionally, we observe an asymmetric defocus blur about the object plane that depends on UAV trajectory, suggesting an extra cue for localization and trajectory inference. These results demonstrate SCHORTY as a practical and Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) efficient passive ranging solution for medium-range UAV observation and motivate future integration with 2.5D/3D PSF engineering and event-based deconvolution to enhance 3D sensing performance.