Embedded vision system for automated drone landing site detection

Abstract

This paper presents an embedded video subsystem used to classify the terrain, based on an image from a camera located under the drone, for the purpose of an automatic landing system. Colour and texture features, as well as decision trees and support vector machine classifiers were analysed and evaluated. The algorithm was supported with a shadow detection module. It was evaluated on 100 test cases and achieved over 80% performance. The designed video system was implemented on two embedded platforms – a Zynq SoC (System on Chip – Field Programmable Gate Array + ARM processor system) and a Jetson GPU (Graphic Processing Unit + ARM processor system). The performance achieved on both architectures is compared and discussed.