Monocular Trail Detection and Tracking Aided by Visual SLAM for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents a monocular vision system susceptible of being installed in unmanned small and medium-sized aerial vehicles built to perform missions in forest environments (e.g., search and rescue). The proposed system extends a previous monocular-based technique for trail detection and tracking so as to take into account volumetric data acquired from a Visual SLAM algorithm and, as a result, to increase its sturdiness upon challenging trails. The experimental results, obtained via a set of 12 videos recorded with a camera installed in a tele-operated, unmanned small-sized aerial vehicle, show the ability of the proposed system to overcome some of the difficulties of the original detector, attaining a success rate of $97.8\,\%$.