Autonomous flying machines or drones use the computer vision technology to hover in the air avoiding the objects to keep moving on the right path. And now artificial intelligence (AI) is used in drones to make this flying machine smarter.
From security surveillance to aerial view monitoring, AI drone is now used by online retail giant Amazon to deliver the products at customer’s doorstep revolutionizing the transportation and delivery system by logistics and supply chain companies.
Computer Vision in Drone Technology
Computer vision is playing a key role in detecting the various types of objects while flying in midair. A high-performance on board image processing and a drone neural network are used for object detection, classification, and tracking while flying into the air.
The neural network in drones helps to detect the various types of objects like vehicles, foothills, buildings, trees, objects on or near the surface of the water, as well as diverse terrain.
Computer vision also helps detect livening beings like humans, whales, ground animals and other marine mammals with a high level of accuracy.
How Drone Technology Works?
A self-flying drone is built with various in-built with computerized programming and using the technology like propulsion and navigation systems, GPS, sensors and cameras, programmable controllers as well as equipment for automated flights.
Video: Drone Detecting Object Through Computer Vision
Drone used to capture the data using the camera and sensors, which is later analyzed to extract useful information to utilize for a specific purpose.
This process is known as computer vision and related to the automatic extraction, analysis and understanding of meaningful information through one or more images processed through computer vision technology.
Deep Machine Learning in Object Detection & Drone Navigation
Computer vision now backed with machine learning and deep learning algorithms is making a drastic change in the drone industry. It helps algorithms to learn from captured images of various objects that come while using the drones for various purposes.
The objects are annotated to make it recognizable to drones through computer vision. And a wide variety of entities are labeled to make sure drone can detect and decide its direction and control to fly safely avoiding the obstacles in the path.
Applications of Computer Vision in Drones:
Object tracking
Self-navigation
Obstacle detection and collision avoidance technologies
Computer vision in drones helps to track the objects while working for self-navigation and detect the obstacles to avoid a collision from such objects.
While object tracking drone captures the real-time data during the flight, processes it with an on-board intelligence system in real-time, and makes a human-independent decision based on the processed data.
While on the other hand, in self-navigation drones get pre-defined GPS coordinates about departure and destination points, with the capability to find the most optimal way and get there without manual control thanks to AI-enabled computer vision advances.
Similarly, GPS navigation is not enough to solve the problem of collision avoidance. Resulting, drones or autonomous flying objects crash into trees, buildings, high-rise poles, drones and various similar varied types of unlimited objects lying or standing in the natural environment.
Here, the drone needs to be trained with a huge amount of data sets to make it learn and detect a wide variety of objects and obstacles, both static and in motion, and avoid them when moving at a high speed.
And it is possible when right image annotation companies ensure providing the precisely annotated data to train the AI model for autonomous flying.
AI-enabled Commercial Drone Use Cases
Drone in Smart Cities & Urban Management
Smart cities are developed with most advanced features like well-connected home and equipment systems with control on the user’s palm.
Most of the infrastructural amenities are either fully or partially automated with advance security surveillance used in AI-based cameras for quick facial recognition and trace the unwanted objects.
Video: AI Drone in Smart Cities
And in urban management drones help to get the Aerial view mapping of urban houses and the urban landscape design allowing civil engineers or architecture to make the most feasible plan layout.
Also Read: How AI Can be Used in Smart Cities: Applications Role & Challenge
Moreover, it also plays a crucial role in traffic monitoring and defines the city route for a smooth and trouble-free movement.
Video: AI Drone in Urban Management
Drone in Agriculture & High-tech Farming
AI drones in agriculture are playing a crucial role in monitoring the crops and plants health conditions. Farmers are using drones to determine the best time to plant to applying the right amount of fertilizer at the right time.
Video: Drone in Agriculture & Farming
Also Read: How AI Can Help In Agriculture: Five Applications and Use Case
Drones are capable to monitor crops, assess soil, check the soil fertility and help crop protection.
A drone is also planting trees by shooting the seedpods into the prepared soil helping farmers to save their cost and time allowing them to get in involved in other activities to improve the productivity of entire agricultural sector.
Drone in Real Estate & Construction Industry
As per the construction companies are going to spend more than $11.2 billion on drones between the next five years, allowing the drone industry to get developed into various fields also allowing the manufacturers to make drones.
Video: Drone at Construction Site
AI drones in construction companies can scan or map the terrain of buildings within a few minutes, that human requires several days to complete.
And with a bird-eye view, for the construction vehicles during the projects, drones are providing an accurate position and information to create self-guided equipment in the near future.
Video: Drone in Real Estate
Similarly, real estate companies are using drones to get photographs of homes and commercial buildings, as well as aerial maps and local information for home buyers to provide them a real scenario without physically visiting at the sites helping them to save their time and efforts.
AI Drone in Military and Defense Sector
In military and defense sector drones are becoming popular to develop for the unmanned weapons to combat or bombard on the enemies in the war.
However, right now drone is already used for patrolling on the borders, monitoring security, tracking storms and performing safety inspections. And many of them also used for food supplies.
Video: AI Drone in Military & Defense
Developing drones need high precision computer vision-based navigation and object detection system to work efficiently. Few drones are now capable of intelligence gathering or chemical detection with a high level of accuracy.
Human Tracking and Face Recognition
Drones are also used for tracking humans in societies or at park from the security perspective. Its camera is used for face recognition to detect suspicious people or track their face gesture or emotion tracking while flying.
Video: Drone in Face Recognition
Developing drones for face recognition needs another technology that can train an AI model to detect the people using their facial attributes.
Again, annotated images used as training data to create an AI model for drone help such autonomous flying machines to identify people among the huge crowd.
Also Read: The Main Objective of Image Annotation in Machine Learning & AI
Drones in Security and Surveillance
Making the life of people safer and secured, drones are playing another role in the security and surveillance of people living in unsafe areas or even in habitat environments.
Drones used as a security camera for monitoring the unusual activities outside threats like theft or violence and protest to recognize the people or track their activities.
Video: Drones in Security and Surveillance
Drone applications into various fields are becoming significant and AI-based drones can provide game-changing results to get connected from distant locations providing real-time data for quick action.
However, in upcoming days, with improved computer vision technology and more efficient training of autonomous flying capability, drones will bring benefits to various crucial industries and help to solve humanity’s greatest problems.
To detect the various objects you need training data for a drone. And these training data include the annotated images of various objects that a drone can recognize through computer vision and move avoiding the obstacles into the path.
And there are many companies in image annotation service to annotate the data with an exceptional level of accuracy to make sure drones can easily detect the varied objects and can be used for various purposes benefiting the humans.
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