The development of image-based algorithm to identify altitude change of a quadcopter

Quadcopter, a popular Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), is able to land, take off, hover, and move on 3D trajectory. The ability requires accurate control of the rotors velocity based on input from its sensors. One of the control mechanisms is the altitude control. This paper presents a new algorithm to identify altitude change of a quadcopter based on image processing techniques. The algorithm is designed to be simple and efficient in terms of computation and memory usage. The algorithm identifies altitude change by calculating correlation function of 10 sampled rows of pixels. This paper also presents some experiments conducted to investigate the performance of the algorithm. The results indicated that the algorithm is able to properly identify altitude change with accuracy of more than 96%.