Target Detection and Position Likelihood using an Aerial Image Sensor

Abstract — Sensor-based control is an emerging challenge in UAV applications. It is essential in a sensing task to account for sensor measurement errors when computing a target position estimate. Source of measurement error includes those in vehicle position and orientation measurements as well as algorithm failures such as missed detections or false detections. Incorpo-rating such errors in aerial sensors is non-trival because of the camera’s perspective geometry. This paper is about a method to incorporate such errors into target position estimates and a calibration methodology to measure the error distributions. A preliminary experiment with real flight data is presented. I. INTRODUCTION AND PROBLEM STATEMENT The importance of aerial sensing has increased due to the explosively increasing use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and emerging application of unmanned ai