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The Research on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Remote Sensing and Its Applications
Li Changchun1,2 Shen Li1 Wang Hai-bo3 Lei Tianjie1*
1 Beijing Normal University College of Resource Science & Technology, Beijing, 100875,China;
lichangchun610@126.com,shenli@ires.cn, ,leitianjie@ires.cn;
2 Henan Polytechnic University School of Surveying &Land Information Engineering, Jiaozuo, Henan, 454000,China;
3 Public Weather Service Center of China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081,China
blueseawave@163.com
AbstractAs an important means of obtaining spatial data,
the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing has such
advantages as real-time, flexible, high-resolution, cost-effective
etc, and it can gather information in dangerous environments
without risk to flight crews. Because UAV remote sensing is a
powerful supplement of spaceborne remote sensing and
airborne remote sensing, it has enormous potential and bright
prospect. In this paper, the compositions and key technologies
of UAV remote sensing system are presented, and the
applications such as land use, land supervision, flood disasters,
meteorology disasters, geological disasters, forest fire disasters
as well as surveying and mapping are summarized. In the end,
we predict the main direction of studying on UAV remote
sensing in the future.
Keywords-unmanned aerial vehicle;remote sensing;
application; research
I. INTRODUCTION
At present, spaceborne and airborne remote sensing are
the main means of acquiring spatial data, but they are unable
to collect data in real-time, their cost is highand they are
sensitive to environment. Many spatial databases based on
remote sensing images are usually outdated because they
cannot be updated immediately. Therefore, we need a
cheaper, more convenient and real-time approach to obtain
spatial data. Compared with spaceborne remote sensing,
UAV remote sensing has a feature of higher temporal
resolution, and can also avoid the effect of cloud; relative to
airborne remote sensing, it is much cheaper and safer. In
addition, UAV remote sensing has such advantages as
flexible, safe, and easy to operate etc, so it becomes an
important direction and a hot subject to study in many
countries [1, 2]. After 21st century, the application fields of
UAV remote sensing are expanded rapidly, with the small,
light, high-precision sensors having been produced, a lot of
countries throw much energy into studying and exploiting
UAV remote sensing.
In this paper, the compositions, key technologies and
application fields of the UAV remote sensing are studied
based on summarizing the current achievements of UAV
remote sensing, and the contents which should be studied in
the future are also predicted.
978-1-4244-5848-6/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE
II. COMPONENTS OF UAV REMOTE SENSING
UAV remote sensing system is made up of unmanned
flight platform, data processing and analyzing system, and
ground control system etc, as shown in Fig.1.
(1)The unmanned flight platform is the important
composition of UAV remote sensing system, which is
composed of unmanned aerial vehicle, mission sensors,
flight control unit, wireless communication unit, GPS unit,
attitude measurement unit, self-feedback stable pan-tilt etc,
as shown in Fig.2.
(2)Data processing and analyzing system is used for
image processing, target location, thematic information
extraction and mapping etc.
(3)The ground control system mainly includes flight
control system and wireless communication system. The
ground control system has the functions of collecting
positioning data, working state, flight attitude of UAV and
remote sensing images etc in real-time, which are used for
flight control and equipments management of UAV [3]. The
main structure of ground control system is shown as Fig. 3.
Figure1. The component of UAV remote sensing system
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Figure2. The component of unmanned flight platform
Figure3. Ground controlling system
III. KEYTECHNOLOGIES OF UAV REMOTE
SENSING
The UAV remote sensing system integrates many
advanced technologies, such as aviation, auto-control,
information technology, data communication and
transmission, sensors technology,3S (GPS, GIS and RS)
[4]. The details of the key technologies are described as
follows.
A.. the platform technology of UAV
The capability of UAV remote sensing platform directly
decides the effect and application range, and its cost is also a
very important factor to total system. The key performance
indexes of the platform include flight height, duration of
flight, payload, flight stability, navigation accuracy, cruising
speed, the way of taking off and landing etc. Its core
technologies are described as follows:
(1) Stabilizing pan-tilt control technology
Stabilizing pan-tilt of UAV ensures that mission sensors
are parallel the ground basically, realizing vertical projection
(error within r3q) [5]. Stabilizing pan-tilt makes use of
vertical gyroscope to measure pitch angle, rolling angle, and
vertical gyroscope, which combines with micro-processing
technology to keep UAV fling vertically to ground.
(2) The navigation and positioning technology
At present, UAV remote sensing system usually takes
use of multimodal technology to navigate, namely, DGPS
combining with inertial navigation device [6, 7]. This
navigation mode which has the features of high precision,
strong reliability and real-time performance can obtain the
high-precision three-dimensional coordinates. They are
crucial to take off automatically and land successfully.
(3)The technology of taking off and landing
automatically
GPS and relay communication system, assisted with
technologies of scene matching, radar navigation,
ground-based station navigation etc, is capable of realizing
UAV to locate accurately, take off and land automatically
with the horizontal precision of 3~5m and vertical precision
of 1m[8,9].
(4)The technology of system failure judgment and
restructure
Multi-redundancy combination that includes the
technologies of treble-redundancy flight control and
management, multi-redundancy steering gear, parachute
emergency recovery etc is applied during system failure
judging and restructuring. These technologies are key factors
for UAV remote sensing platform to carry out failure
judgment and safety guarantee [10, 11, 12].
B. The technologies of data real-time processing,
transmission and receiving
In order to ensure UAV remote sensing system work all
day, high-resolution remote sensing images and sensor data
must be downloaded in real time and received safely. The
key technologies mainly include:
(1) Data compression technology
Data compression is the key step for real-time data
transmission. At present, the data compression technology
used by UAV remote sensing system is lossy compression
algorithm with high compression ratio, the algorithm is
summarized by the following steps: discrete cosine
transform (DCT);quantizing the parameters of DCT;coding
the quantized DCT parameters to achieve the minimum
entropy.
(2) Data fusion technology
Data fusion technology is to fuse remote sensing images,
GPS positioning data, auxiliary navigation data, flight
attitude of UAV, attitude angles of sensors and other data
obtained by all kinds of sensors, then to generate remote
sensing images with geographical coordinates and temporal
information [13].
(3) Real-time Data transmission technology
In order to transmit data in real time, we should establish
broadband communication network between UAV and
ground receiving station, which settles the basic framework
for wireless communication transmission [14].
(4)Real-time data receiving and decompression
technology
The way for data to be received in real time is to
establish fixed and mobile ground receiving stations. The
data received by ground receiving stations is compressed, so
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it must be decompressed. The steps of data decompression
include: decoding, inverse quantization, inverse discrete
cosine transform etc [15, 16, 17].
IV. THE APPLICATIONS OF UAV REMOTE
SENSING
Land use dynamic monitoring, land supervision,
monitoring and evaluation of flood disaster, meteorological
disasters monitoring, inspection and prevention of geological
disasters, earthquake disaster rescuing and evaluation,
topographic mapping and cadastral surveying are the main
application fields for UAV remote sensing[18-19].
Aforementioned application fields will be discussed in the
following parts:
(1)Land use dynamic monitoring
Using multi-temporal and high-resolution images of
UAV remote sensing, the land use information of different
periods can be extracted and analyzed. Based on this
information, we carry out change detection, which is crucial
for land use monitoring dynamically.
(2) Monitoring and evaluation of flood disaster
The application of UAV remote sensing in monitoring
and evaluation of flood disaster is to compare and analyze
multi-temporal images, the development and changing
situation of flood will be monitored and the probable trend
can be predicted. In addition, we can also extract the extent
of flood from images and make damage assessment.
(3)Forest-fire prevention and insect pest monitoring
In major fire prevention districts, we can use UAV
remote sensing system to exercise fire prevention patrol,
hotspot investigation, fire detection, and fire suppression
command. Moreover we can monitor the damage condition
of forest dynamically caused by insect pest, and can also
determine the location of fire point and the extent of insect
pest.
(4) Meteorological disaster monitoring
Through the images over disaster areas obtained by UAV
remote sensing, we are able to monitor the process of
meteorological disaster and assess damage, extract the area
where disaster occurred, estimate the extent of disaster,
which offers the immediate information for rescuing.
(5)Inspection and prevention of landslide, mud-rock
flow
For the serious geological disasters such as landslide and
mud-rock flow, we should analyze the severity level of
disaster and their spatial distribution to help government
distributing the relief resources. To finish the task, obtaining
disaster information immediately is necessary. UAV remote
sensing images are the main source to collect the information.
UAV remote sensing images can also offer circumstance
information of disaster and basic data of forecasting to
monitor disaster changing dynamically.
(6) Disaster relief and evaluation of earthquake
The main application of UAV remote sensing system on
earthquake is obtaining the images of earthquake area
rapidly. These images help us to determine the
earthquake-strike extent, distress severity of buildings,
structures and engineering facilities needed to be repaired
urgently, which offers the basis for decision-makers to
organize disaster relief.
(7) Topographic mapping and cadastral surveying
After obtaining two images from same area but different
angles, combining with GCPs (ground control points),
elements of exterior orientation and terrain coordinates of
points on the images will be calculated. The calculated
results are applied to topographic mapping and cadastral
surveying.
In addition, UAV remote sensing has also been used for
mineral resources investigation, forest covering monitoring,
customs inspection, marine resources and environment
monitoring, aerial photography on urban traffic flow, urban
and transportation planning. Especially, the system has broad
application prospect in environment monitoring on hazard
zone and pollution monitoring on toxic zone.
V. REARCHPROSPECTS OF UAV REMOTE
SENSING
In the future, the study on UAV remote sensing should
be focused on the following aspects:
(1) Attitude measurement when taking remote sensing
images
At present, UAV remote sensing system has not fixed
attitude measuremen device, so we should develop this
device and integrate it into the system to collect the data of
location, attitude and direction of every image automatically
when making exposure. We acquire the positioning
information while obtaining remote sensing images to offer
the initial value for processing the images rapidly.
(2)Improving the navigation accuracy
We should further study on the combined navigation
style of GPS/ GNSS(Global Navigation Satellite
System)/inertia navigation/image matching. The
MIMU(Micro Inertial Measurement Units)with the features
of micro size and low cost, inertia device and MIMU will be
more suitable for accurate navigation of all kinds of micro
UAV remote sensing systems.
(3) Remote sensing image splicing in real time
The starfire difference technology works without
reference station and communication link, and is easy to
operate, so we can use this technology to splice images
stably, reliably and rapidly in different distortion, various
illumination changing and diverse resolution. It is an
important direction in the future to process UAV remote
sensing images.
(4) Multi mission sensors integration
To make system be smaller, we mainly focus on
integration of different sensors, such as SAR, infrared
camera and visible light CCD, let each of them work
effectively.
(5)Real-time remote sensing image data beyond visual
range transmission based on satellites and UAV relay
When UAV flies beyond the largest visible range of
ground receiving stations, we should use relay link based on
satellites or UAV to transfer images to these stations in real
time.
(6)Using UAV to test small satellites-borne devices
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The capacity of measuring and controlling system,
imaging system, communication system of small satellites
should be carried out simulation experiment before
launching. At present, this work is commonly done on
platforms of manned aircraft. Because UAV has such
features as flexibility and flight endurance, we can study on
making use of it to test the devices of small satellites.
VI. RESULTS
In recent years, with the rapid development of aviation,
microelectronics, computer, navigation, communication,
sensors, UAV remote sensing has been developed rapidly
from researching stage to practical stage, widely applied in
many fields, and has become one of the important directions
of remote sensing. The study on the technologies of attitude
measurement , accurate navigation, real-time remote sensing
images splicing and data transmission multi-sensors
integrationGPS difference and data transmission based on
relay satellites is not mature, so they will be significant
directions for studying.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Support by the eleventh five-year national scientific
and technological support project (2006BAJ05A01), 863
project (2007AA120306), international cooperation project
(2007DFA20640), International Scientific and Technological
Cooperation Program (2007DFA20640).
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