The Application of Hough Transform and Canny Edge Detector Methods for the Visual Detection of Cumuliform Clouds

Abstract

The increase in flying time of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is a relevant and difficult task for UAV designers. It is especially important in such tasks as monitoring, mapping, or signal retranslation. While the majority of research is concentrated on increasing the battery capacity, it is also important to utilize natural renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, thermals, etc. This article proposed a method for the automatic recognition of cumuliform clouds. Practical application of this method allows diverting of an unmanned aerial vehicle towards the identified cumuliform cloud and improving its probability of flying into a thermal flow, thus increasing the flight time of the UAV, as is performed by glider and paraglider pilots. The proposed method is based on the application of Hough transform and Canny edge detector methods, which have not been used for such a task before. For testing the proposed method a dataset of different clouds was generated and marked by experts. The achieved average accuracy of 87% on the unbalanced dataset demonstrates the practical applicability of the proposed method for detecting thermals related to cumuliform clouds. The article also provides the concept of VilniusTech developed UAV, implementing the proposed method.

Defects Detection of Lithium-Ion Battery Electrode Coatings Based on Background Reconstruction and Improved Canny Algorithm

“…Defect image segmentation is performed to extract the defective region from the image background, including threshold segmentation [20], edge detection [21], region growing [22], and other methods. These algorithms have the common problem of a contradiction between segmentation accuracy and noise immunity.…”

BSV System with MSC and Its Application in the Measurement of Surface Cracks

“…Terefore, we can design edge detection algorithms according to this characteristic. In this paper, we adopt the Canny algorithm to detect the crack edge in the image [24,25].…”

Detection and Statistics of Offshore Aquaculture Rafts in Coastal Waters

“…Depicted as circles, and automatically counting the number of circles [37], the number statistics of aquaculture rafts is realized. Hough transform is mainly used in computer vision to transform spatial detection into the problem of parameter space through the point-line duality of image space and parameter space [38][39][40][41], which is widely used in computer vision.…”

“…Depicted as circles, and automatically counting the number of circles [37], the number statistics of aquaculture rafts is realized. Hough transform is mainly used in computer vision to transform spatial detection into the problem of parameter space through the point-line duality of image space and parameter space [38][39][40][41], which is widely used in computer vision. The basic idea of the Hough transform circle detection is to map the edge pixels in the image space to the parameter space, accumulate the corresponding cumulative values of coordinate point elements in the parameter space, and finally determine the center and radius of the circle according to the cumulative values [42].…”