1. Image Processing of Video on Unmanned Aircraft Video processing on-board Unmanned Aircraft Aims to develop image acquisition, processing and transmission techniques for an unmanned aircraft that will aid in navigation and identification of candidate targets. The purpose of candidate target identification is to allow the aircraft to find a possible targets, such as a lifeboat at sea, and then to autonomously track it until a remote human operator can verify or eliminate that target. This is seen as a valuable aid to search and rescue and coastal surveillance applications. The purpose of extracting features for navigation is to use those features for verification of position and altitude, in conjunction with other sensors such as GPS for position, heading, ground speed and altitude, attitude (pitch, bank, yaw) and barometric pressure for altitude. Significant information about the altitude and ground speed at which the aircraft is flying can also be extracted by examining optical flow and the scale of objects and texture in the video. Video also has a role to play in the area of obstacle avoidance in low-level flight and terrain following, and in autonomous landing. The challenges are many. Lightweight, low electrical power, high computational power computer required. Long range radio communications. Real-time processing. Variable lighting. Unconstrained visual environment. Unsteady camera platform. Image understanding, despite decades of work, still a very challenging field. Terry is concentrating on the challenges posed by the integration of onboard computer and sensors, including camera, the real-time image processing and understanding and short-range telemetry communications. PhD thesis presentation for Terry Cornall 2001 Introduction The Aerobotics Research Group in CTIE is conducting research into many aspects of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) in collaboration with Aerosonde Robotics Pty Ltd. This poster details the work being carried out by Terry Cornall as part of that collaboration for his PhD. Receive Ground-station Computer Video of Brigg’s field Wantirna from transmitter on Lawrence Hargrave 1 flying under remote control at Brigg’s field Wantirna. Vehicle supplied by Aerosonde Robotics Pty. Ltd. Piloted and maintained by Ray Cooper. Image processing to produce segmentation maps of primitive features, using methods such as Hough transform for circles and lines, Sobel and Laplacian operators for edge detection, binary thresholding and Morphological operators plus texture and color analysis for blob detection. These features will be passed on to higher levels for use in generating and testing model hypotheses involving spatial and geometrical relationships. Note that these types of analyses have to run in ‘real’ time, i.e they must be computed within seconds. Other types of processing include Pyramidal Lucas Kanade optical flow to determine ground speed and aircraft attitude. Using (short-range) analog and digital communications, the image processing can be carried out on the ground using the analog video transmitted back from the aircraft, or on board the aircraft and the results transmitted to the ground for display via the digital telemetry link. On-board Computer Telemetry radio tranceiver Telemetry radio tranceiver Avionics sensors. Gyro, GPS, altitude, airspeed