A Height Estimation Approach for Terrain Following Flights from Monocular Vision

In this paper, we present a monocular vision-based height estimation algorithm for terrain following flights. The impressive growth of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) usage, notably in mapping applications, will soon require the creation of new technologies to enable these systems to better perceive t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2016-12, Vol.16 (12), p.2071-2071
Main Authors: Campos, Igor S G, Nascimento, Erickson R, Freitas, Gustavo M, Chaimowicz, Luiz
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aircraft
Algorithms
computer vision
Consumption
Decision trees
Flight
Mapping
Monocular vision
New technology
optical flow
Optical flow (image analysis)
robotics
Terrain following
terrain following flights
UAV
Unmanned aerial vehicles
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Summary:In this paper, we present a monocular vision-based height estimation algorithm for terrain following flights. The impressive growth of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) usage, notably in mapping applications, will soon require the creation of new technologies to enable these systems to better perceive their surroundings. Specifically, we chose to tackle the terrain following problem, as it is still unresolved for consumer available systems. Virtually every mapping aircraft carries a camera; therefore, we chose to exploit this in order to use presently available hardware to extract the height information toward performing terrain following flights. The proposed methodology consists of using optical flow to track features from videos obtained by the UAV, as well as its motion information to estimate the flying height. To determine if the height estimation is reliable, we trained a decision tree that takes the optical flow information as input and classifies whether the output is trustworthy or not. The classifier achieved accuracies of 80 % for positives and 90 % for negatives, while the height estimation algorithm presented good accuracy.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s16122071