Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) are becoming more predominant in modern reconnaissance in both military and civilian applications.

There is a need for local intelligence gathering using small,low cost and often disposable UAV platforms.In many situations it may not be practical or desirable for the UAV to be relaying information to the ground via radio link.

The development of a vision processing system for a low-cost UAV with a total flying weight of under 3kg.

A low resolution CMOS camera is interfaced to the Mini board to provide the video source. Data is sent from the camera in a serial bit stream. Each pixel is clocked out of the camera, and into the Mini board in a raster pattern

Due to the susceptibility of RGB to varying lighting conditions, the first stage of the vision system is to convert the pixels to HSV space.

A Laplacian operator is chosen for the edge detection as it is known to produce closed contours and thus better defined shapes

The template for the objects to be detected involves a number of considerations to ensure correct and reliable results

It is used in military application It is also used communication field It is also used in defence system

The simulation results produced from this Visual Processing System shows that it is possible to construct a low cost lightweight hardware platform suitable for true real time object identification and tracking. An FPGA of larger capacity would simplify the process and allow for more substantial image processing tasks.

Possible extensions to this design could be implement more complex shape matching, as well as combining groups of objects by comparing coordinates. This could also serve the purpose of determining the direction of groups of objects arranged in a line.