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Airborne Unmanned Sensor System for UAVs

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Vehicular Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 September 2024 | Viewed by 1181

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Autonomous and Intelligent Systems Group, Centre for Autonomous and Cyberphysical Systems, Cranfield University, Cranfield MK43 0AL, UK
Interests: unmanned aerial vehicles; decision making on multi-agent systems; distributed sensing and estimation; data-centric guidance and control
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Aerospace, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Interests: guidance of aerial vehicles; decision making; application of artificial intelligence in aerospace
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The proliferation of low-cost, lightweight, and power-efficient sensors, in combination with advances in networked systems, has enabled the use of multiple sensors in UAVs to accomplish different missions, including environmental monitoring, habitat monitoring, airborne target tracking, situation awareness, etc. These advances have permitted the use of multiple UAVs to cooperatively perform large-scale sensing tasks which would otherwise be difficult to accomplish by individually operating these sensing devices. The challenge of operating low-cost sensors, e.g., visual camera, infrared/laser range finder, acoustic sensor, etc., is that they are likely to contain some degree of uncertainties and usually have limited spatial coverage, communication and computation capabilities. Modern technologies such as model-/data-driven estimation, heterogeneous data fusion, optimization, and artificial intelligence can improve the performance of using low-cost onboard sensors. This Special Issue aims to identify recent theoretical and technical advances in airborne unmanned sensor systems for UAVs. Related topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Airborne target tracking in cluttered environments;
  • Airborne target tracking in GPS-denied environments;
  • Integrated tracking and searching in unknown environments;
  • Distributed multi-sensor fusion;
  • Sensor management and UAV trajectory optimization;
  • Sensor bias calibration;
  • Integrated target tracking and calibration;
  • Scalable target(s) tracking algorithm;
  • Applied artificial intelligence in target tracking.

Prof. Dr. Hyo-sang Shin
Prof. Dr. Shaoming He
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 1964 KiB  
Article
Utility of Spectral Filtering to Improve the Reliability of Marine Fauna Detections from Drone-Based Monitoring
by Andrew P. Colefax, Andrew J. Walsh, Cormac R. Purcell and Paul Butcher
Sensors 2023, 23(22), 9193; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23229193 - 15 Nov 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 815
Abstract
Monitoring marine fauna is essential for mitigating the effects of disturbances in the marine environment, as well as reducing the risk of negative interactions between humans and marine life. Drone-based aerial surveys have become popular for detecting and estimating the abundance of large [...] Read more.
Monitoring marine fauna is essential for mitigating the effects of disturbances in the marine environment, as well as reducing the risk of negative interactions between humans and marine life. Drone-based aerial surveys have become popular for detecting and estimating the abundance of large marine fauna. However, sightability errors, which affect detection reliability, are still apparent. This study tested the utility of spectral filtering for improving the reliability of marine fauna detections from drone-based monitoring. A series of drone-based survey flights were conducted using three identical RGB (red-green-blue channel) cameras with treatments: (i) control (RGB), (ii) spectrally filtered with a narrow ‘green’ bandpass filter (transmission between 525 and 550 nm), and, (iii) spectrally filtered with a polarising filter. Video data from nine flights comprising dolphin groups were analysed using a machine learning approach, whereby ground-truth detections were manually created and compared to AI-generated detections. The results showed that spectral filtering decreased the reliability of detecting submerged fauna compared to standard unfiltered RGB cameras. Although the majority of visible contrast between a submerged marine animal and surrounding seawater (in our study, sites along coastal beaches in eastern Australia) is known to occur between 515–554 nm, isolating the colour input to an RGB sensor does not improve detection reliability due to a decrease in the signal to noise ratio, which affects the reliability of detections. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Airborne Unmanned Sensor System for UAVs)
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