Computer vision in drones
Air survey is the most massive use of drones, but not the only one. Drones are used in industry, agriculture, architecture, people rescue, and other fields.
However, not all drones have computer vision now. Most often, operators control a robot from the ground and watch the flight through a camera mounted on a drone. In the case of signal loss with the operator, drones can come back using GPS, or stop flying and land smoothly on the ground. But in the future, the use of computer vision will become a common feature of drones.
Wildlife Animal Populations
It is needless to say that computer vision drones are successfully used when working with animals. Researchers have developed a computer vision system that spots wild animals in the savannah from drone pictures and effectively track populations. This method has proven to be more effective than inspecting savanna with helicopters or installing cameras.
Law and order
Developed countries police use drones to monitor order on city streets. It allows to track down violators more effectively. The next step in the police drones development is the introduction of facial recognition systems based on computer vision. As technology improves, drones learn to recognize people with minimal error.
Shepherd drone
Australian researchers have developed a shepherd drone. He can move on any surface and thus monitor the animal herd. The developers plan to improve the drone by adding an image recognition system to make it more efficient. Maybe, a drone with machine vision will completely replace the shepherd’s work in the future.
Counting Crop
The most popular drone using is agriculture. One drone can greatly facilitate the life of the farmer. It can be used for spraying fertilizers, field inspections, soil, and plants monitoring. Using drone saves time and money. It is much faster to pollinate or monitor fields from the air than from the ground. Drone using is certainly cheaper than helicopter inspections. The most advanced agricultural computer vision drones can even determine the amount of the crop.
The Tennessee University researchers have proved that the drone image recognition algorithm can calculate the yield with 93 percent accuracy. Such an accurate result cannot be obtained from manual calculations. The researches conducted a field survey from a drone from a height of 30 and 120 meters. The resulting images were analyzed by an image recognition algorithm.
Computer-assisted drones are widely used by farmers now. They allow to give information about the crop quality, soil and plants state, fertilizers and moisture needs. The computer vision is also used to evaluate infrared spectrum images.
The drone technology development is impossible without improving computer vision technology. As machine vision will be better, the more advanced robots and drones will become. So people’s lives will be more comfortable.