Potential UAV Landing Sites Detection through Digital Elevation Models Analysis
This addresses the need for reliable landing zone detection for UAVs in normal or emergency situations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with specific improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting potential landing sites for UAVs by identifying flat areas using digital elevation models, and the result shows its efficiency and superiority over a state-of-the-art algorithm in evaluations on real-world and synthetic datasets.
In this paper, a simple technique for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) potential landing site detection using terrain information through identification of flat areas, is presented. The algorithm utilizes digital elevation models (DEM) that represent the height distribution of an area. Flat areas which constitute appropriate landing zones for UAVs in normal or emergency situations result by thresholding the image gradient magnitude of the digital surface model (DSM). The proposed technique also uses connected components evaluation on the thresholded gradient image in order to discover connected regions of sufficient size for landing. Moreover, man-made structures and vegetation areas are detected and excluded from the potential landing sites. Quantitative performance evaluation of the proposed landing site detection algorithm in a number of areas on real world and synthetic datasets, accompanied by a comparison with a state-of-the-art algorithm, proves its efficiency and superiority.