Today I read a paper titled “Detecting and avoiding frontal obstacles from monocular camera for micro unmanned aerial vehicles”
The abstract is:
In literature, several approaches are trying to make the UAVs fly autonomously i.e., by extracting perspective cues such as straight lines.
However, it is only available in well-defined human made environments, in addition to many other cues which require enough texture information.
Our main target is to detect and avoid frontal obstacles from a monocular camera using a quad rotor Ar.Drone 2 by exploiting optical flow as a motion parallax, the drone is permitted to fly at a speed of 1 m/s and an altitude ranging from 1 to 4 meters above the ground level.
In general, detecting and avoiding frontal obstacle is a quite challenging problem because optical flow has some limitation which should be taken into account i.e.
lighting conditions and aperture problem.