Choosing the Best Embedded Processing Platform for On-Board UAV Image Processing

Nowadays, complex image processing algorithms are a necessity to make UAVs more autonomous. Currently, the processing of images of the on-board camera is often performed on a ground station, thus severely limiting the operating range. On-board processing has numerous advantages, however determining a good trade-off between speed, power consumption and weight of a specific hardware platform for on-board processing is hard. Many hardware platforms exist, and finding the most suited one for a specific vision algorithm is difficult. We present a framework that automatically determines the most-suited hardware platform given an arbitrary complex vision algorithm. Our framework estimates the speed, power consumption and flight time of this algorithm for multiple hardware platforms on a specific UAV. We demonstrate this methodology on two real-life cases and give an overview of the present top performing CPU-based platforms for on-board UAV image processing.Hulens D., Verbeke J., Goedemé T., ''Choosing the best embedded processing platform for on-board UAV image processing'', Computer vision, imaging and computer graphics theory and applications, 10th international joint conference, VISIGRAPP 2015, revised selected papers - communications in computer and information science series, vol. 598, pp. 455-472, 2016, Springer (10th international conference on computer vision theory and applications - VISAPP 2015, March 11-14, 2015, Berlin, Germany).status: publishe