Mini-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Remote Sensing: Techniques, applications, and prospects

The past few decades have witnessed great progress for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civilian fields, especially in photogrammetry and remote sensing. In contrast with manned aircraft and satellites, UAVs have many promising characteristics—flexibility, efficiency, high spatial/temporal resolution, low cost, easy operation, and so forth—that make them an effective complement to the other two platforms and a cost-effective means for remote sensing.