Unsupervised Perception Model for UAVs Landing Target Detection and Recognition

International audienceToday, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) play an interesting role in the so-called Industry 4.0. One of many problems studied by companies and research groups are the sensing of the environment intelligently. In this context, we tackle the problem of autonomous landing, and more precisely, the robust detection and recognition of a unique landing target in an outdoor environment. The challenge is how to deal with images under non-controlled light conditions impacted by shadows,change of scale, perspective, vibrations, noise, blur, among others. In this paper, we introduce a robust unsupervised model allowing to detect and recognize a target, in a perceptual-inspired manner, using the Gestalt principles of non-accidentalness and grouping. Our model extracts the landing target contours as outliers using the RX anomaly detector and computing proximity and a similarity measure. Finally, we show the use of error correction Hamming code to reduce the recognition errors