Optimized UAV view planning for high-quality 3D reconstruction of buildings using a modified sparrow search algorithm

High-quality 3D reconstruction of existing buildings is essential for their maintenance, restoration, and management. Effective view planning for image collection significantly impacts the quality of photogrammetry-based 3D reconstruction. Intricate building structures, such as the overhangs, protrusions, and concave regions, can lead to under-sampled regions with traditional view planning methods, while excessively increasing the number of views require substantial computational resources and data collection efforts. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel exploration-then-exploitation view planning strategy to achieve high-quality building reconstruction with minimal views. Firstly, the UAV no-fly regions and building attention regions are identified through semantic and geometric analysis of the images and coarse model during the exploration stage. Then, a novel optimization fitness function is mathematically formulated, considering building attention regions and reconstruction influential factors, including distance, incidence angle, parallax angle, and overlap. Furthermore, a modified sparrow search algorithm is proposed with the improved optimization mechanism and the integration of view planning physical model, enabling effective generation of optimal viewpoint set. Finally, the collision-free shortest trajectory is designed, allowing the UAV to collect images and reconstruct a high-quality model during exploitation stage. Experiments in virtual and real-world scenarios validate the effectiveness of our proposed modified SSA mechanism and the view planning strategy. Results demonstrate that the modified SSA achieves higher convergence accuracy and speed compared to the original SSA, PSO and GA. Our strategy can generate more accurate and complete 3D reconstruction models with the same or fewer captured images compared to commonly used and state-of-the-art strategies. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd.