A Method for Covert Video Surveillance of a Car or a Pedestrian by an Autonomous Aerial Drone via Trajectory Planning

This paper considers the application of covert video surveillance of a ground mobile target by an autonomous aerial drone. We design a metric to measure the covertness of the drone. Then, we formulate a multi-objective drone trajectory planning problem, which maximizes the drone disguising performance and minimizes its energy consumption. We furthermore propose a forward dynamic programming method to solve the problem online and conduct simulations to verify its effectiveness.