Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle visual system for ground moving target positioning

Recently, Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAV) are used in a variety of reconnaissance, surveillance, combat applications and so on. Tracking and positioning ground moving targets using a camera mounted on SUAVs has important applications in military and civilian purposes. Although many approaches for a vision-based target positioning system have been developed, most researches are limited to target recognition algorithm or target state estimation. And hardware implementation schemes which can work well with the whole SUAV system are seldom discussed. In order to achieve an available systematic scheme, a complete visual system which incorporates a vision-based ground moving target positioning algorithm is presented in this paper. Experiment results are finally shown and commented. Experiments indicate that the system performs great real time response and high positioning precision.