An Automated Visible / Infrared Image Analysis System of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have evolved rapidly over the past decades driven primarily by military uses. This paper illustrates the application of UAV as a platform equipped with visible/infrared sensors for battlefield reconnaissance. The characteristics of UAV imagery, however, necessitates the development of an automated visible / infrared image analysis system to enhance the operational utility of UAVs. To achieve the interpretation of the visible light and infrared images acquired by the cameras mounted on UAVs, we proposed an automatic image analysis framework in this paper. Although this system involves many aspects of data processing, for our research we chose to focus on direct and indirect image georeferencing and target tracking technique. Finally, experiments were conducted on the visible and infrared image data sets obtained from the UAV to verify the performance of the proposed system. The experimental results have demonstrated that the effectiveness of the proposed multispectral image analysis system and the availability of UAVs as a reconnaissance platform.