UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MARA

FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE,
PLANNING AND SURVEYING
CENTRE OF STUDIES FOR SURVEYING
SCIENCE AND GEOMATICS
SEMESTER 8 2017/2018
UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE SYSTEM
FOR MAPPING (GLS696)

APPLICATION OF UAV
AP2208E

PREPARED BY:
MOHAMAD AKMAL BIN ABDUL RAZAK
(2015826928)

SUBMISSION DATE: 15/05/2018

PREPARED FOR: DR. KHAIRUL NIZAM BIN TAHAR

Introduction

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technique becomes faster, simpler and lower cost due to rapid
development of technologies in mapping. Unmanned aerial vehicles have become cheaper
because many control functions can be implemented in software rather than having to depend
on expensive hardware (Braun et al., 2008). Due to the usage of composite material strength
they may fly at extremely high altitudes. They may have embedded various navigation systems
or recording devices such as Red, Green, Blue (RGB) cameras, infrared cameras and else.
Some of the advances of the use of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) are that they are
lightweight and easy to transport, they capture high resolution and low-cost images, they can fly
at variety of altitudes depending on data collection needs.

UAVs also are helpful tools in assessing damage after a disaster, extensively used in rescues
operation, helping in delivering medicines and food, providing the live status of affected area,
communicating in crisis, to help for those in need. UAVs are useful tools in monitoring crops to
ensure the maximum yield is realized. The use of UAVs is also being used for monitoring remote
land areas that are not accessible via car, boat, or foot. They were initially used for chemical
spraying while they were the solution to visibility problems due to cloudy weather or
inaccessibility to a field of tall crops. There are variety of other applications of UAV: -
1. Landscape Photograph

Traditional house and landscape aerial photography is possibly the easiest way to start using a
UAV. Pictures of buildings taken with a UAV are almost as good as expensive pictures taken
from a real airplane or helicopter with a particularly expensive camera. A model plane or small
helicopter can be flown at low altitude at the desired location for multiple photos. You can fly
around the target and continuously photograph it from various distances; some pictures are
bound to be good.

Aerial photographers sell pictures of private houses for around RM 1000 – RM 2000 and
pictures of factories or a mine for up to €1,000. Photographing with a model airplane or
helicopter is considerably cheaper, especially when you only need to take photographs to order.

Landscape photographs can also be sold on websites. There are some people usually a graphic
designer or advertisement interested in this landscape photography will buy the picture from the
pilot. However, only good and successful shots should be sent there, and some effort should be
made when tagging the photos, so that users can find them. As a rule of thumb, if you send 100
good pictures to the photography office, you will make RM 500 in a year, and RM 3000 for 500
good pictures.
In other aspect, wedding photography also has been one of the trends nowadays in application
of UAV. Since its photo is wide coverage it is useful to cover up a whole family in one pictures
and take the photo with ease. This is will allow an UAV pilot an opportunity to do a side income
since taking photos using UAV approach is not cheap.
2. Monitoring and detection of esca disease in the vineyard

This journal was carry out a precision viticulture which optimize quality and yield,
improve sustainability and reduce management costs. The procedures are separate to three
segments from observation and data collection, data interpretation and evaluation and
implementation of site (specific management). Grapevine leaf stripe disease report a drastic
alteration of photosynthetic functions as well as a stimulation of defense responses in affected
grapevines several days before the appearance of the first visible symptoms on leaves. This
activity is to investigate the correlation between Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)
high resolution images acquired by drone and symptomatic vines monitored by ground based
observation. With their aim to develop an innovative methodology aimed primarily to conduct a
quantitative and qualitative analysis of the symptom spread, and then to investigate a predictive
tool of the esca symptoms. The site location was happened to be in Azienda Agricola Villa
Montepaldi. They were monitor Esca disease symptoms at single plant level since 2003 by
using a georeferenced with a high resolution (0.02 m) differential GPS Leica GS09 GNSS.
Now, they were monitor using a Mikrokopter OktoXL equipped with Multispectral camera
Tetracam ADC-Lite. The multispectral camera used to capture NDVI index highlights the
difference between the reflectance in the visible red band (RR) and near infrared (RNIR). This
index is sensitive to photosynthetic activity and amount of vegetation, defined as Photosynthetic
Active Biomass (PAB). The NDVI data analysis were separated into three symptom class
C=Healthy, A=Asymptomatic vines, which have shown symptoms in the previous years and s=
symptomatic vines.
Then, they analyze the differences between asymptomatics and symptomatics vines vs healthy
control vines according to the difference in stomata conductance and Leaf temperature as well
as differences in length and weight of pruning wood. Finally, they did the regression linear model
for those three types of class; asymptomatics and symptomatics vines vs healthy control vines.
The combined use of UAV platform and differential GPS has made it possible to obtain high
resolution NDVI maps on the ground (3.90 cm/pixel), and perform an accurate analysis at single
plant level.
3. The Plantation Monitoring and Yield Estimation using Autonomous
Quadcopter for Precision Agriculture

This journal describes the framework of performing a plantation yield forecasting using
generic monocular quadcopter. The proposed framework has been evaluated on a low cost
commercial quadcopter Bebop equipped with frontal 14 Mega pixels “fish-eye” camera and
records video in an 180o field of view with 1920X1080 resolution in its on-board memory. They
specifically use this for yield estimation of pomegranates and its flower buds. At the same time,
it even transmits the video stream of 640X468 resolution over Wifi link which is used by
navigation module for the perception of environment and sate-estimation. Plantation monitoring
and yield estimation follows three main stages for yield prediction: segmentation, feature
extraction and classification.

Existing fruit segmentation algorithms work either on color or shape, which is identified by both
lighting and occlusion. Moreover, object recognition algorithms either follow the sliding window.
To make the detection resilient to lighting, occlusion and direction their framework extracts
monocular cues, viz. color and texture features, from each candidate object and stores in the
form of the histogram: Color and Edge Directivity Descriptor. The histogram is divided into 6
regions, each determined by the extracted texture information.
Each region is further divided into 24 individual sub regions each comprising color information
6X24=144. The HSV color channel is provided as input to a fuzzy system to obtain color
information. On Autonomous Navigation Framework is a requirement for precision agriculture
using quadcopters. This study was using a Bebop quadcopter which is a low cost, self-
stabilizing, with inbuilt Wifi Hotspot, GPS, IMU and ability to adjust the orientation of the high
resolution monocular camera digitally, independent from the motion of the quadcopter. It also
provides efficient communication for control commands and data over 2.4 Ghz Wifi link with host
device. Monitoring and yield estimation of pomegranate plantation requires the quadcopter to
navigate autonomously at an average height of pomegranate plants, through the inter-row path.
Due to unplanned drift in motion or error in state estimation prevalent in quadcopters, the drone
may lean and crash into plantation rows. To avoid such a situation, a visual feedback
mechanism was developed to align the drone to the middle of the inter-row path while moving
towards destination GPS way-point. The challenges in detection of pomegranates and flowers
include occlusions by other objects and limited field of view of the camera. Shapes which are
occluded by the leaves, twigs and other foreign objects are extremely challenging to detect.
Other challenge is the system response time of the quadcopter had to be determined
experimentally since internal software architecture is undocumented and wireless
communication channel has unpredictable lag. The quadcopter is unstable in high wind
conditions
4. Surveillance, inspection and search

UAVs can also be used for searches. There is one problem, however. The small permissible
flight area means that only short range searches can be performed. The UAV can stream live
aerial images, but the quality is not impressive, and it is quite impossible to find a person
standing still in a large forest. Another alternative is to take photos and search them for the
person later on. The most suitable terrain for UAVs is lowest seedling or a high greenfield. It
would be extremely slow and laborious to conduct a manual ground-level search of these
terrains.

UAV are important to fighting large wildfires. They fly above the fire to gather information on its
location, where it may spread and are also used to drop water and fire suppressants.

In Australia, the feasibility of locating a person in the desert and even dropping a water bottle to
him are being studied. In Lapland, the feasibility of locating dead reindeer with a helicopter is
being studied: reindeer wear a collar that starts sending a tracking signal if the reindeer has not
moved for a few hours. In low-lying places, the signal may not be transmitted that far, but a
helicopter flying overhead once a week could pick up the signals.

Power lines can also be inspected with a UAV, but the problem in this case is the legal
requirement that the UAV must be seen from the take-off point. Usually these inspections are
planned well in advance, however, which means that the airspace can be closed for other traffic.
When the airspace is closed, the legal limitations no longer apply, and the UAV can be used
within its operating range; up to 50 km on one flight.
If a search is being performed at the request of the police or rescue authorities, they can be
asked to close the airspace for other traffic. This may take as little as an hour to come into
effect, after which time the search can be performed at higher altitudes and outside the field of
vision.
5. Acquisition of pre- and post-event data-set

One of the most useful characteristic of UAVs is the possibility to acquire on demand a data-set
of a limited area. Aerial or satellite images are conventionally used for geospatial data collection.
However, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as a suitable technology for providing
very high spatial and temporal resolution data at a low cost. Their aims to show the potential of
using UAVs for map creation and updating.

This is particularly relevant when these systems are adopted to gain valuable information over a
particular environment and/or geomorphological process. In geohazards, the effects of the
evolution of a geological/geomorphological process can be often achieved by the comparison of
pre- and post-event information in the study area, which suggested an increase in slope
instability with time. A new complex translational landslide evolving into mudflows, activated
during the winter of 2003, was monitored using an experimental system based on terrestrial
LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and GPS (Global Positioning System) technologies.
In the past, this approach was often supported by the use of terrestrial or airborne LiDAR but
the introduction of UAV represents nowadays a valuable alternative for a multi-temporal
acquisition of data-sets that can be used for the study of natural hazards. In this special issue,
several applications in the field of geological mapping are presented and discussed focusing on
the fractures’ identification of marble quarries, the geological mapping of mountain areas and
the identification of interseismic shallow deformations. Hydrogeological applications are instead
related to the identification of subfluvial springs measurements of open channel water surface
velocities and measurement of flushed sediment in a reservoir
6. Support During Emergencies

The second typology of applications considered in this special issue is the use of UAV during
emergencies. The use of these systems for supporting the management of emergencies can be
critical particularly when the meteorological conditions are unfavourable.

In this special issue, an application of UAVs for search and rescue operations for missing
people in a natural environment and a multipurpose UAV for mountain rescue operations are
presented. Jurecka and Niedzielski demonstrate that the use of UAVs for quick and reliable
localization of lost persons in natural areas is a suitable approach. The application is based on
the concept of a crow's flight distance travelled by a lost person and its probability distribution.
 Instead, Silvagni et al. present a multi-rotors flying platform and its embedded avionics
designed to meet environmental requirements for mountainous terrain such as low
temperatures, high altitude and strong winds. The system is able to host different payloads
(separately or together) such as: (1) avalanche beacon (i.e. the ARTVA) with automatic signal
recognition and path following algorithms for the rapid location of snow-covered body; (ii)
cameras (visible and thermal) for search and rescue of missing persons on snow and in woods
during day or night light conditions.

There also can be search and rescue for people who drowning in the sea. It needs to be quick
for deployment of drones to support the victims with drop of buoyant. However, the accuracy
and the quickness in action is needed in this type of rescue. Otherwise, the victims will
submerge and the buoyant is no longer can be used.
7. Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Crime Scene Investigations

The objective of the study is to evaluate the feasibility and accuracy the method concerned and
to determine the logistical implementation and quality assurance of the method. Then, to
determine the value of the method in crime scene investigation and to determine the need of
training staff. UAV can be multipurpose in investigation scene such as photography, videotaping,
search for evidence, safety assessment, examination of sites which are difficult or near
impossible to reach.

Before visiting the scene, UAV can be used to minimize contamination of the scene and
examine the particular scene. Other than that, there were only several methods to capture
image from aerial photograph such as climbing up the ladder of firefighting truck or to a high rise
building, use aircraft that highly cost and need professional handle, so UAV is the latest solution
to captured aerial photograph with low cost management. Aerial photograph give investigator a
‘bird eye view’ and provide a good evidence to use in court. UAV also can be used for forensic
purpose where it obtaining real- time high quality images of scene.
Meanwhile, UAV can shortening the period of road closure because it very quickly assessing the
scene to avoiding traffic congestion. Besides that, UAV is not used a big financial to carry out
the crime scene investigation where it not burden the organization to provide it. Lastly, UAV can
be used as connector between the investigators in the lab and the crime scene. It also help to
gain access to in an area that hard to access and retrieve evidence from the area where
investigators itself hard to get the evidence at the area.
8. UAV Photogrammetry for Mapping and 3D Modeling

UAV system give great advantage for geomatics application which it ability to quickly deliver
high temporal and spatial resolution image information and to allow fast response in critical
situations in 3D geo-information. UAV have capability of fast data acquisition, transmission and
processing. The flight planning was conducted in the lab with software that starting with area of
interest (AOI), ground sample distance (GSD) and parameter of the mounted digital camera.

The platform also was establish to conduct the process of flight during data acquisition. Then,
the camera calibration and image triangulation were applied where the task require the
extraction of common features visible in as many image as possible. The technique was
automatic aerial triangulation (AAT). Next, through the process of surface measurement and
feature extraction to produce 3D reconstruction and modelling. The scene can be digitally
reconstructed starting from the kwon exterior orientation and camera calibration parameters.
Then, the man made features and vector information extraction were used automated dense
image matching techniques or interactive methods. The accurate 3D data can be create by
interactive approaches deliver sparse point clouds which need structuring and editing. The
photo-realistic visualization can be obtained by use automated method which produce a dense
point cloud describing the surface of the surveyed scene (DSM). The process were used in the
application at several place such as Veio archaeological area, Italy, Copan archaeological area,
Honduras, Pava excavation area, Italy, and Agriculture analyses.
9. An Image-Based Technique for 3D Building Reconstruction using Multi-View
UAV images

Geometric and semantic features were used to reconstruct the building façade with a
knowledge of based modelling. Other than that, points cloud and close range images were and
a set of geometric primitives used to achieve fully automatic reconstruction of complex building.

That included three steps in this method such as camera orientation, image segmentation, and
image-based modelling (Reisner Kollmann, 2013). Then, the main steps to reconstruct a 3D
model of complex building facades using UAV images were pose estimation, point cloud
generation, and 3D modelling for the last step. First step is pose estimation where it to improve
the accuracy of pose parameters and calculate the 3D coordinates used some corresponding
features of images, ground control points (GCP) in WGS84 coordinate system and initial pose
parameters in an Automatic Ariel Triangulation (AAT) and Bundle Block Adjustment (BBA)
solution. The output of this step are sparse point clouds in a projected coordinate system,
oriented images, and refined absolute pose parameters. Next step is point cloud generation,
where the redundancy of disparity is used for blunder detection and improving the accuracy of
the final depth maps due to existing high overlap between images. The last process is to
generate an integrated point cloud where the depth map from different stereo models are
merged together. The final steps is 3D modelling where it comprising mesh generation and
refinement, and texture mapping. Mesh refinement divided into two steps and the first steps is to
have a surface covering the whole area to model based on Delaunay 2.5D triangulation.

The result of this step is some small mesh merged into the biggest parts based on the size their
areas. Then, the rough mesh is refined based on the deviation error between the mesh and the
estimated of best shape to generate a light-weighted and accurate polygonal models. The
deviation error is calculated using local curvature to get an accuracy of mesh. Next step in 3D
modelling is texture mapping or multi-texturing where it assigned to each triangle in 3D model,
so the misalignment between textures from different sources could be very small.
10. Military Uses Drones

The research and development departments of the world's defense companies have barely
begun to explore all the different uses for UAV or drones. and governments, aware of this, are
growing increasingly keen to find out what else they can do.

And yet from the handheld Black Hornets to the 40-meter wingspan of the Global Hawk, military
drones are so varied that no single company, or even country, dominates their manufacture. And
while some 90 countries have drones in their military arsenals, only 11 of these have armed
drones. Here are the basic types and where they come from.

Micro- and nano-drones

Insect-sized spy machines may have become part of the furniture in blockbuster movies, but
they've also been hovering over real battlefields for several years. The most obvious example of
such a drone is the 1-inch-by-4-inch Black Hornet, which British soldiers have been using to
look over walls and around corners in Afghanistan since 2013.
Medium-sized reconnaissance drones

The vast majority of military drones, the "work horses," as Ulrike Esther Franke, drone expert at
the European Council on Foreign Relations, calls them, are medium-sized, medium-range flying
robots used for ISTAR purposes. These drones, like the larger surveillance drones, are often
also known as MALE or HALE drones - acronyms that stand for Medium Altitude Long
Endurance or High Altitude Long Endurance.

Large combat and surveillance drones

Probably the most well-known military drones are the large-scale combat drones used by the
US, which are all operated from US soil by pilots via a satellite link-up. The Predator, and its
larger, newer cousin, the Reaper, both MALEs made by the US firm General Atomics, are armed
and used for controversial extrajudicial killings in countries where the US is not officially at war.
Reapers can be armed with various air-to-surface missiles, as well as laser-guided bombs, have
a range of over a thousand miles and a maximum non-stop flight time of 14 hours. Apart from
the US, several other NATO air forces operate Reapers, including those of the UK, Spain,
France, and the Netherlands. The Chinese-made rival, the CH-4, which looks very similar to the
Reaper, has been bought by Egypt and Iraq.