Automated Air Drop Video Data Reduction and Air Delivery Payload Position Estimation

The paper focuses on the development and evaluation of an autonomous payload tracking capability for determining time, state and attitude information (TSPI) for all types of airdrop loads. This automated capability of accurately acquiring TSPI data should reduce the labor time and eliminate man-in-the-loop errors. The paper analyses the problem and then proceeds with the description of off-the-shelf video-data processing software adopted for obtaining TSPI. It further describes algorithms used to determine system's position as the first step towards a complete TSPI retrieval. These algorithms are based on tracking a test article's center (or any other predetermined point) by several stationary cameras with known positions. The paper concludes with examples of video data processing and system's parameters estimation