Civil UAV system for earth observation

Orbital and suborbital-based remote sensing systems have been a stalwart for Earth observation sciences. In recent years, there is an increasing interest for civilian applications of low-cost aerial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This paper presented design and implementation of a low-cost small civilian UAV system, including its field flight validation, system calibration, and mapping accuracy evaluation. This UAV system is specifically designed as an economical, moderately functional, small airborne platform intended to meet the requirement for fast-response to time-critical events in many small private sectors or government agencies for the small areas of interest. The UAV field flight test demonstrated that the designed low-cost UAV is capable of collecting clear and high-resolution video. A software system, called VideoOrthoring, is presented for processing the UAV-based video flow. The experimental results demonstrates that the planimetric accuracy of orthoimage can achieve 1∼2 pixels. The UAV-based orthoimage in combination with GIS-supported data from fast response to time-critical event, e.g., forest fire, is described.