Proof-of-Concept of Uncompressed 4K Video Transmission from Drone through mmWave

Abstract

Drones are attracting increasing attention in varieties of research fields because of their flexibility and are expected to be applied to a wide range of potential applications, among which the super-high-resolution video surveillance system using drones especially gains the authors' research attention. Surveillance systems using cameras with fixed locations always suffer the blind spots due to the blockage or inappropriate deployments. Instead, by using the drones equipped with cameras, the surveillance performance can be drastically improved due to their high mobilities. The video quality is also a key factor of the surveillance performance. In face recognition, one of the most important surveillance applications, the uncompressed video can greatly improve the detection accuracy, but it is difficult to transmit uncompressed video in real time due to the huge data sizes. To address the issue, we propose to use the ultra-high speed mmWave communication for the video transmission from drones. Moreover, due to the limited battery energy and computing power in drones, we introduce the edge computing and propose to offload all the computation from the drones to the ground station. In addition, a proof-of-concept prototype hardware of the proposed uncompressed 4K video transmission system from drones through mmWave is developed, and the experiments results are consistent with the system design expectations.