Unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance system (UAVSS) for forest surveillance and data acquisition

An application framework is proposed in this paper that considers low cost surveillance mechanism and data acquisition in the forest. An application is developed as proof of concept with detailed design that can take advantage of unmanned urban vehicle to be directly configured and controlled in real-time. The advantages are numerous; it can be used for many purposes. For example, it can be used for observing critical and important area for intruder activities or to know the current state of any object of interest. We considered using machine learning and image processing and can be used for species of trees in the forest by color and size detection. A separate service running on separate remote server will be responsible for this. We have proposed a application framework particularly to be cheap and easy to handle by non-technical persons and that it does not require large software system knowledge like Pix4D or DroneDeploy. This system will be useful for operations and research specially the forestry and palm oil plantation surveillance, and sustainable timber industry that specially needs carefully collected imageries and data from objects. Collection of raw data from sensor networks is also proposed in the system architecture.