Vision-Based Multi-View Cooperative Perception for UAV Swarms in GNSS-Denied Transportation Hub Reconnaissance

Abstract

Rapid preliminary reconnaissance of Critical Transportation Hubs (CTHs) by UAV swarms is vital during post-disaster rescue operations. However, limited camera fields of view, large heading variances, and GNSS multipath errors near massive steel-concrete structures complicate multi-view cooperative perception. This paper introduces a discrete, vision-based cooperative perception framework utilizing a decentralized anchor-wingman architecture. The pipeline integrates a Prob-IoU-optimized YOLO26m-OBB detector to extract oriented infrastructure footprints. To handle severe rotational discrepancies without IMU priors, a global scene registration cascade—combining SuperPoint and an Optimal Transport-driven LightGlue—is employed to establish robust geometric correspondences. Furthermore, a Projected Polygon Intersection over Union (Proj-IoU) mechanism, coupled with an RMSE-weighted spatial fusion strategy, dynamically associates and deduplicates overlapping targets across distributed views. Experimental results indicate that the framework achieves a low pixel-level RMSE of 2.12 pixels on the source domain and maintains a highly stable 2.36 pixels during zero-shot cross-domain testing (SUES-200 dataset), successfully resolving extreme heading variances up to 270°. The Proj-IoU mechanism resolves multi-source redundancies—collapsing overlapping projections by over 50%—bounding the localization error to approximately 1.06 m. Operating at 6.7 FPS on edge hardware via low-bandwidth tensor transmission, this system provides a rigorous geometric foundation for autonomous swarms, enabling downstream collision-free trajectory planning and Multi-Target Task Allocation (MTTA) in GNSS-denied environments.