Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are commonly known as drones, have proved to be useful not only on the battlefields where manned flight is considered too risky or difficult, but also in everyday life purposes such as surveillance, monitoring, rescue, unmanned cargo, aerial video, and photography. More advanced drones make use of global positioning system (GPS) receivers during the navigation and control loop which allows for smart GPS features of drone navigation. However, there are problems if the drones operate in heterogeneous areas with no GPS signal, so it is important to perform research into the development of UAVs with autonomous navigation and landing guidance using computer vision. In this research, we determined how to safely land a drone in the absence of GPS signals using our remote maker-based tracking algorithm based on the visible light camera sensor. The proposed method uses a unique marker designed as a tracking target during landing procedures. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art object trackers in terms of both accuracy and processing time, and we perform test on an embedded system in various environments.

Extracting powerful image features plays an important role in computer vision systems. Many methods have previously been proposed to extract image features for various computer vision applications, such as the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), speed-up robust feature (SURF), local binary patterns (LBP), histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), and weighted HOG. Recently, the convolutional neural network (CNN) method for image feature extraction and classification in computer vision has been used in various applications. In this research, we propose a new gender recognition method for recognizing males and females in observation scenes of surveillance systems based on feature extraction from visible-light and thermal camera videos through CNN. Experimental results confirm the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art recognition methods for the gender recognition problem using human body images.

Recently, autonomous vehicles, particularly self-driving cars, have received significant attention owing to rapid advancements in sensor and computation technologies. In addition to traffic sign recognition, road lane detection is one of the most important factors used in lane departure warning systems and autonomous vehicles for maintaining the safety of semi-autonomous and fully autonomous systems. Unlike traffic signs, road lanes are easily damaged by both internal and external factors such as road quality, occlusion (traffic on the road), weather conditions, and illumination (shadows from objects such as cars, trees, and buildings). Obtaining clear road lane markings for recognition processing is a difficult challenge. Therefore, we propose a method to overcome various illumination problems, particularly severe shadows, by using fuzzy system and line segment detector algorithms to obtain better results for detecting road lanes by a visible light camera sensor. Experimental results from three open databases, Caltech dataset, Santiago Lanes dataset (SLD), and Road Marking dataset, showed that our method outperformed conventional lane detection methods.

Accurate segmentation of the iris area in input images has a significant effect on the accuracy of iris recognition and is a very important preprocessing step in the overall iris recognition process. In previous studies on iris recognition, however, the accuracy of iris segmentation was reduced when the images of captured irises were of low quality due to problems such as optical and motion blurring, thick eyelashes, and light reflected from eyeglasses. Deep learning-based iris segmentation has been proposed to improve accuracy, but its disadvantage is that it requires a long processing time. To resolve this problem, this study proposes a new method that quickly finds a rough iris box area without accurately segmenting the iris region in the input images and performs ocular recognition based on this. To address this problem of reduced accuracy, the recognition is performed using the ocular area, which is a little larger than the iris area, and a deep residual network (ResNet) is used to resolve the problem of reduced recognition rates due to misalignment between the enrolled and recognition iris images. Experiments were performed using three databases: Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)-Iris-Distance, CASIA-Iris-Lamp, and CASIA-Iris-Thousand. They confirmed that the method proposed in this study had a higher recognition accuracy than existing methods.