Drone pictures, hands-free

singapore — As more people shoot pictures and videos from consumer drones, researchers in Singapore have found a way round the frustrating task of framing and taking photos while manually piloting the craft.

“We want to enable more intuitive and natural interaction with the flying drone to take photos autonomously — even for the novice user who has not used drones before,” said Ziquan Lan, one of four researchers behind the project.

Their innovation, called XPose, works in several stages. The user tells the drone to take photographs from different angles of the subject, such as a statue. Next, the shot is composed by moving objects on photos from a sample gallery. Then the drone finds the best position to take the commissioned photo. No manual piloting of the drone is needed.

The researchers from the National University of Singapore say their prototype, based on a Parrot Bebop quadcopter, relies mainly on a single monocular camera and works reliably even when there is no GPS signal. —