Vision based ground marker fast detection for small robotic UAV

A vision based real-time circular ground marker detection method, which is used to guild small autonomous control robotic UAV(RUAV) to pick up ground target object, is presented. The method is based on RHT algorithm and running entirely on GPU via Microsoft DirectX 11 API, since the CPU onboard doesn't have sufficient computing power. In order to get a highest possible performance, special efforts are made in many ways, such as threads workloads balancing, data transfer lag hiding, etc. Experimental result shows the proposed method can give proper detection result and reach a high enough frame rate on a notebook level GPU, running much faster than the CPU version of detection method.