Abstract
Among UAV applications, real-time high-resolution video surveillance systems using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) especially gain our research interests, because high mobilities of UAVs and high qualities of videos can dramatically improve the surveillance performance and evolve the system, especially for artificial intelligence (AI)-based monitoring systems. However, it is challenging to transmit high-resolution videos to ground station in real-time and also impossible to perform AI detection based on these videos on UAVs. To address the challenges, we propose to take full advantages of mmWave communications and to apply it into UAV-based surveillance systems to transmit ultra-high-quality and ultra-high-resolution uncompressed 4K videos. To increase energy efficiency of UAVs, we propose to offload all computations via mmWave from UAVs to ground station. Moreover, in addition to design of system architecture, proof-of-concept (PoC) prototype hardware of the proposed system is practically developed to demonstrate technical feasibilities of mmWave communication on UAVs and the enhancements to practical surveillance applications. The practical issues in the implementation and the necessary hardware/software applied in the prototype system are explained in detail in this paper. An outdoor PoC experiment is conducted, and the experimental results are consistent with design, so that the effectiveness of the system is confirmed.
Highlights
T HANKS to the increasing miniaturization of electronic components and development of high-performance control algorithms in the recent decades, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), so-called drones, have evolved greatly to be more and more operable, functional, productive and affordable than ever before
The widely used conventional video surveillance systems have to employ surveillance cameras installed in fixed locations which are pre-configured according to surveillance requirements and scenario, because the cameras are lacking in mobilities and it is difficult to efficiently transmit surveillance video to surveillance center from everywhere
UAV PC is a lightweight Intel NUC PC, whose functions are to arrange video recording and mmWave connections. In this PoC system, commands sent to UAV and real-time context information collected from surveillance are all through Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz band, IEEE 802.11n)
Summary
T HANKS to the increasing miniaturization of electronic components and development of high-performance control algorithms in the recent decades, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), so-called drones, have evolved greatly to be more and more operable, functional, productive and affordable than ever before. MmWave-based air-to-ground communication, as the only feasible and qualified candidate of wireless communication techniques, is employed to transmit the huge amount of data of high-specification surveillance videos in real-time from UAVs to ground station. All computations are offloaded from UAVs to ground station via mmWave communication, in order to mitigate the energy consumption on UAVs. Second but more importantly, in addition to the system design and analysis, we focus more on practical development and implementation issues of the PoC hardware prototype to demonstrate technical feasibilities of mmWave communications on UAVs and the consequent enhancements to practical surveillance applications. This work is the first pioneering project of a system-level hardware implementation of a complete system which validates and demonstrates high-mobility UAVs, ultrahigh-specification raw video, mmWave air-to-ground communications and computation offloading in the surveillance applications.
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