Development of optical flow based velocity estimation system for UAV

Abstract

Optical flow research is a popular field of study in today’s technological age. With the vast improvements in image capturing capabilities and processing power, optical flow has been adopted in applications such as autonomous vehicles and automated assembly line. To better understand how optical flow can be adopted to today’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technology, various optical flow algorithms have been studied. These algorithms were tested using a camera and the results were examined to determine its feasibility during implementation. Findings revealed that each algorithm had its benefits as well as drawbacks. However, one of the chosen algorithms proved to be more effective during experiments. Certain considerations must be given to account for the restrictions of hardware used in this project, such as Random Access Memory (RAM) and processing speed.