A vision-based target tracking control system of a quadrotor by using a tablet computer

Abstract

This paper proposes a vision-based target tracking system of a quadrotor. The system consists of a vision-based target detection algorithm using color and image moment of a target candidate. A flight control layer working with the vision layer and the low level quadrotor control layer is designed using the offset of the target from the center of the image frame. The image processing and control algorithms are all implemented on a latest tablet computer, which was capable of running those algorithms in real-time. The proposed system was validated on a commercially available quadrotor platform and demonstrated satisfactory target tracking performance.