Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become indispensable in various applications, including surveillance, urban scene analysis, and agricultural monitoring. Accurate altitude estimation is critical for UAV operations, especially in environments where traditional sensors like GPS, pressure altimeters, and radar may fail. This paper explores the use of infrared and thermal imaging for relative altitude estimation of UAVs, highlighting their significant advantages over traditional RGB images. Infrared and thermal imaging offer superior performance in low-light and adverse weather conditions, providing clearer visibility and more reliable feature detection. By leveraging the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) features, this approach utilizes the inherent benefits of thermal images to estimate altitude changes based on the size variations of matched key points in consecutive images. Experimental results on two infrared thermal UAV datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showing substantial improvements in estimation accuracy when combined with Siamese networks for enhanced feature matching.
Recommended Citation
S. N. Esfahani and J. Sarangapani, "Relative Altitude Estimation of Infrared Thermal UAV Images using SIFT Features," 2024 IEEE 26th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, MMSP 2024, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Jan 2024.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/MMSP61759.2024.10743514
Department(s)
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Second Department
Computer Science
Keywords and Phrases
altitude estimation; infrared thermal images; Siamese networks; SIFT; UAV
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2025 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Jan 2024
Included in
Computer Sciences Commons, Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons, Medicine and Health Sciences Commons
Comments
Army Research Office, Grant W911NF-22-2-0185