Acquiring Precise Coordinates of Ground Targets through GCP Geometric Correction of Captured Images in UAS

Acquiring precise coordinates of ground targets can be regarded as the key mission of the tactical-level military UAS(Unmanned Aerial System) operations. The coordinates deviations for the ground targets estimated from UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) images may depend on the sensor specifications and slant ranges between UAV and ground targets. It has an order of several tens to hundreds of meters for typical tactical UAV mission scenarios. In this paper, we propose a scheme that precisely acquires target coordinates from UAS by mapping image pixels to geographical coordinates based on GCP(Ground Control Points). This scheme was implemented and tested from ground control station for UAS. We took images of targets of which exact location is known and acquired the target coordinates using our proposed scheme. The experimental results showed that errors of the acquired coordinates remained within an order of several meters and the coordinates accuracy was significantly improved.