Rapid mapping, monitoring and tracking-Development of low-cost unmanned aerial mapping system (UAMS)

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There is a continuous demand for reducing the time and cost required to generate geo-information from geo-data acquired from air-and space-borne sensors. The acquisition and processing time is becoming critical for situations, such as emergency response, fire fighting, traffic and environmental monitoring, where the conditions, events and phenomena are continuously changing in space and time. The availability of rapid mapping, monitoring and tracking systems and technology will contribute to reducing this "waiting-time" by providing the required data and information to support on-time knowledge-based decision-making. This research proposes an approach aiming to reduce both the acquisition and processing time by developing a flexible aerial platform carrying imaging and ranging sensors and by developing methods for mapping, change detection and tracking. Aerial data collection is still a way to obtain better perspective and coverage over an area and also has the ability for targeted coverage at flexible visiting times. Traditional air-surveys have certain limitations, such as high mobilization costs and flight restrictions. The emerging low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) will be used to develop an unmanned aerial mapping system (UAMS), consisting of the aerial vehicle equipped with GPS/INS navigation systems coupled with imaging and ranging sensors, such as still and video camera and LIDAR. Methods and technology will be developed to extract metric and thematic geo-information from the UAMS acquired data. Monitoring and tracking research will involve the integration of existing data and information in the estimation process for change detection and the use of video image sequence to monitor and track fast-occurring spatio-temporal events/phenomena. The results of this research are expected to contribute to time-critical operations such as emergency response, environmental monitoring, ecosystems monitoring, fire fighting, search and rescue operations, and traffic monitoring. They will also support application oriented mapping, such as pipeline monitoring and precision farming.