A morphology-based algorithm for label location and identification

Label location and recognition has become a crucial task for today's Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. We proposed a morphology-based algorithm to locate and recognize labels. This algorithm is insensitive to scaling and rotation, and able to work at low resolution. The label positioning and recognition strategy we designed is divided into two steps. First, at the altitude of 10m or so, we apply dilation processing and edge detection on the images sent back by UAV. Then combining the current heading information of the vehicle, we are able to give the topology map of all labels. After that the vehicle is lowered to about 5m and we apply erosion processing on the returned image and then recognize each label using image measurement and image analysis methods. The validity of this algorithm is well verified at ARCC 2004.