A survey of optical flow techniques for UAV navigation applications

Optical flow has been widely used by insects and birds to support navigation functions. Such information has appealing capabilities for application to small or micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially for navigation and collision avoidance in urban or indoor areas. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of existing optical flow techniques for UAV navigation applications. Detailed comparisons are made among different optical-flow-aided navigation solutions with emphasis on the sensor hardware as well as optical flow motion models. A summary of current research status and future research directions are further discussed.

[1]  David J. Fleet,et al.  Performance of optical flow techniques , 1994, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[2]  G LoweDavid,et al.  Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints , 2004 .

[3]  Michael J. Black,et al.  The Robust Estimation of Multiple Motions: Parametric and Piecewise-Smooth Flow Fields , 1996, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[4]  Atsushi Imiya,et al.  Optical Flow Computation for Compound Eyes: Variational Analysis of Omni-Directional Views , 2005, BVAI.

[5]  Thomas J. Mueller,et al.  Fixed and Flapping Wing Aerodynamics for Micro Air Vehicle Applications , 2001 .

[6]  Dario Floreano,et al.  Toward 30-gram Autonomous Indoor Aircraft: Vision-based Obstacle Avoidance and Altitude Control , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[7]  Mandyam V. Srinivasan,et al.  Landing Strategies in Honeybees and Applications to Uninhabited Airborne Vehicles , 2004, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[8]  Matthew Garratt,et al.  Adding Optical Flow into the GPS/INS Integration for UAV navigation , 2009 .

[9]  Andrew M. Hyslop,et al.  Autonomous Navigation in Three-Dimensional Urban Environments Using Wide-Field Integration of Optic Flow , 2010 .

[10]  Richard Szeliski,et al.  A Database and Evaluation Methodology for Optical Flow , 2007, 2007 IEEE 11th International Conference on Computer Vision.

[11]  Robert E. Mahony,et al.  Landing a VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on a Moving Platform Using Optical Flow , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[12]  YangQuan Chen,et al.  Autopilots for small unmanned aerial vehicles: A survey , 2010 .

[13]  Mandyam V. Srinivasan,et al.  A vision system for optic-flow-based guidance of UAVs , 2007 .

[14]  Normand Teasdale,et al.  Real-time eye blink detection with GPU-based SIFT tracking , 2007, Fourth Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV '07).

[15]  Hideaki Murayama,et al.  Design of a miniature, multi-directional optical flow sensor for Micro Aerial Vehicles , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[16]  Matthew A. Garratt,et al.  Vision‐based terrain following for an unmanned rotorcraft , 2008, J. Field Robotics.

[17]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  An Iterative Image Registration Technique with an Application to Stereo Vision , 1981, IJCAI.

[18]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  Maximizing miniature aerial vehicles , 2006, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[19]  Esch,et al.  Distance estimation by foraging honeybees , 1996, The Journal of experimental biology.

[20]  Marcello R. Napolitano,et al.  A Comparison of Optical Flow algorithms for Real Time Aircraft Guidance and Navigation , 2008 .

[21]  Rogelio Lozano,et al.  Real-Time Stabilization of an Eight-Rotor UAV Using Optical Flow , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[22]  Kenzo Nonami,et al.  Optic flow-based vision system for autonomous 3D localization and control of small aerial vehicles , 2009, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[23]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  Pitch-Altitude Control and Terrain Following Based on Bio-Inspired Visuomotor Convergence , 2005 .

[24]  Hans J. Schneebeli,et al.  A general approach for egomotion estimation with omnidirectional images , 2002, Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Omnidirectional Vision 2002. Held in conjunction with ECCV'02.

[25]  Dario Floreano,et al.  Optic-flow-based steering and altitude control for ultra-light indoor aircraft , 2004 .

[26]  Nicolas H. Franceschini,et al.  Optic flow regulation: the key to aircraft automatic guidance , 2005, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[27]  Marc Pollefeys,et al.  An open source and open hardware embedded metric optical flow CMOS camera for indoor and outdoor applications , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[28]  Robert E. Mahony,et al.  Hovering flight and vertical landing control of a VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using optical flow , 2008, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[29]  Berthold K. P. Horn,et al.  Determining Optical Flow , 1981, Other Conferences.

[30]  Jonghyuk Kim,et al.  Dual Optic-flow Integrated Navigation forSmall-scale Flying Robots , 2007 .

[31]  Marcello R. Napolitano,et al.  A comparative study of optical flow and traditional sensors in UAV navigation , 2013, 2013 American Control Conference.

[32]  Marc Pollefeys,et al.  Real-time velocity estimation based on optical flow and disparity matching , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[33]  P. Anandan,et al.  A computational framework and an algorithm for the measurement of visual motion , 1987, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[34]  J. Koenderink,et al.  Facts on optic flow , 1987, Biological Cybernetics.

[35]  Mandyam V Srinivasan,et al.  Honeybees as a model for the study of visually guided flight, navigation, and biologically inspired robotics. , 2011, Physiological reviews.

[36]  David J. Fleet,et al.  Computation of component image velocity from local phase information , 1990, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[37]  Rick Lind,et al.  Vision-based navigation using multi-rate feedback from optic flow and scene reconstruction , 2005, The Aeronautical Journal (1968).

[38]  R. Lind,et al.  State Estimation using Optical Flow from Parallax-Weighted Feature Tracking , 2006 .

[39]  Mandyam V. Srinivasan,et al.  An image-interpolation technique for the computation of optic flow and egomotion , 1994, Biological Cybernetics.

[40]  Randy Beard,et al.  Maximizing Miniature Aerial Vehicles Obstacle and Terrain Avoidance for MAVs , 2006 .

[41]  Hu Sheng,et al.  Fractional-order variational optical flow model for motion estimation , 2013, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[42]  Hao Feng,et al.  Parallelization and characterization of SIFT on multi-core systems , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization.

[43]  Robert Mahony,et al.  Terrain Following using Wide Field Optic Flow , 2010, ICRA 2010.

[44]  Michael J. Black,et al.  On the Spatial Statistics of Optical Flow , 2005, Tenth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'05) Volume 1.

[45]  Marcello R. Napolitano,et al.  Comparing Optical Flow Algorithms Using 6-DOF Motion of Real-World Rigid Objects , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews).

[46]  Dario Floreano,et al.  Autonomous Flight at Low Altitude Using Light Sensors and Little Computational Power , 2010 .

[47]  Nanning Zheng,et al.  Stereo Matching Using Belief Propagation , 2002, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..