A Comprehensive Review for Typical Applications Based Upon Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Platform

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied in military and civilian fields due to their flexibility and effectiveness. As a vital component of UAVs, the vision system has taken on great significance in different applications (e.g., autonomous landing, traffic surveillance, and disaster rescue) to attract widespread attention in recent years. Therefore, the automatic understanding of visual data collected from these air platforms becomes urgently needed in UAV systems. In this review, we revisit and summarize the recent techniques and developments for several typical UAV applications, including object detection, object tracking, and semantic segmentation. In addition, we also highlight the difficulties and subsequent orientations from different perspectives, which may stimulate future research and applications in the UAV vision era.

Automated summary

Unmanned aerial vehicles have been widely used in military and civilian fields due to their flexibility and efficiency. The vision system, as an essential component of UAVs, has gained significant attention in recent years for various applications. This review focuses on the automatic understanding of visual data collected from UAVs and provides an overview of techniques and developments in object detection, tracking, and semantic segmentation. The challenges and future directions in UAV vision are also highlighted.