Outdoor environment monitoring with unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of video surveillance of outdoor environments with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Specifically it proposes a two-step approach, with an initial offline stage in which a mosaic of the zone to be monitored is built from video sequences. The second step tackles with the problem of online detection of relevant differences between the acquired images and the mosaic model. A GPS-assisted approach is proposed to deal with efficiency issues in this online step. Experimental results prove that the proposed approach can be used to detect relevant changes in the specific case of road safety assurance in dangerous zones. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.