Drones are becoming increasingly popular not only for recreational purposes but also in a variety of applications in engineering, disaster management, logistics, securing airports, and others. In addition to their useful applications, an alarming concern regarding physical infrastructure security, safety, and surveillance at airports has arisen due to the potential of their use in malicious activities. In recent years, there have been many reports of the unauthorized use of various types of drones at airports and the disruption of airline operations. To address this problem, this study proposes a novel deep learning-based method for the efficient detection and recognition of two types of drones and birds. Evaluation of the proposed approach with the prepared image dataset demonstrates better efficiency compared to existing detection systems in the literature. Furthermore, drones are often confused with birds because of their physical and behavioral similarity. The proposed method is not only able to detect the presence or absence of drones in an area but also to recognize and distinguish between two types of drones, as well as distinguish them from birds. The dataset used in this work to train the network consists of 10,000 visible images containing two types of drones as multirotors, helicopters, and also birds. The proposed deep learning method can directly detect and recognize two types of drones and distinguish them from birds with an accuracy of 83%, mAP of 84%, and IoU of 81%. The values of average recall, average accuracy, and average F1-score were also reported as 84%, 83%, and 83%, respectively, in three classes.

This paper focused on the necessity of radiometric calibration to distinguish diseased trees in orchards based on aerial multi-spectral images. For this purpose, two study sites were selected where multispectral images were collected using a multirotor UAV. The impact of radiometric correction on plant disease detection was assessed in two ways: 1) comparison of separability between the healthy and diseased classes using T-test and entropy distances; 2) radiometric calibration effect on the accuracy of classification. The experimental results showed the insignificant effect of radiometric calibration on separability criteria. In the second strategy, the experimental results showed that radiometric calibration had a negligible effect on the accuracy of classification. As a result, the overall accuracy and kappa values for un-calibrated and calibrated orthomosaic classifications of the citrus orchard were 96.49%, 0.941, 96.57% and 0.942, respectively, using five spectral bands as well as DVI, NDRE, NDVI and GNDVI vegetation indices using a random forest classifier. The experimental results were also similar at the other study site. Therefore, the overall accuracy and kappa values for the un-calibrated and calibrated orthomosaic classifications were 95.58%, 0.913, 95.56% and 0.913, respectively, using five spectral bands as well as NDRE, BNDVI, GNDVI, DVI, and NDVI vegetation indices.

The use of drones in various applications has now increased, and their popularity among the general public has increased. As a result, the possibility of their misuse and their unauthorized intrusion into important places such as airports and power plants are increasing, threatening public safety. For this reason, accurate and rapid recognition of their types is very important to prevent their misuse and the security problems caused by unauthorized access to them. Performing this operation in visible images is always associated with challenges, such as the small size of the drone, confusion with birds, the presence of hidden areas, and crowded backgrounds. In this paper, a novel and accurate technique with a change in the YOLOv4 network is presented to recognize four types of drones (multirotors, fixed-wing, helicopters, and VTOLs) and to distinguish them from birds using a set of 26,000 visible images. In this network, more precise and detailed semantic features were extracted by changing the number of convolutional layers. The performance of the basic YOLOv4 network was also evaluated on the same dataset, and the proposed model performed better than the basic network in solving the challenges. Compared to the basic YOLOv4 network, the proposed model provides better performance in solving challenges. Additionally, it can perform automated vision-based recognition with a loss of 0.58 in the training phase and 83% F1-score, 83% accuracy, 83% mean Average Precision (mAP), and 84% Intersection over Union (IoU) in the testing phase. These results represent a slight improvement of 4% in these evaluation criteria over the YOLOv4 basic model.

Geophysical surveys, a means of analyzing the Earth and its environments, have traditionally relied on ground-based methodologies. However, up-to-date approaches encompass remote sensing (RS) techniques, employing both spaceborne and airborne platforms. The emergence of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has notably catalyzed interest in UAV-borne geophysical RS. The objective of this study is to comprehensively review the state-of-the-art UAV-based geophysical methods, encompassing magnetometry, gravimetry, gamma-ray spectrometry/radiometry, electromagnetic (EM) surveys, ground penetrating radar (GPR), traditional UAV RS methods (i.e., photogrammetry and LiDARgrammetry), and integrated approaches. Each method is scrutinized concerning essential aspects such as sensors, platforms, challenges, applications, etc. Drawing upon an extensive systematic review of over 435 scholarly works, our analysis reveals the versatility of these systems, which ranges from geophysical development to applications over various geoscientific domains. Among the UAV platforms, rotary-wing multirotors were the most used (64%), followed by fixed-wing UAVs (27%). Unmanned helicopters and airships comprise the remaining 9%. In terms of sensors and methods, imaging-based methods and magnetometry were the most prevalent, which accounted for 35% and 27% of the research, respectively. Other methods had a more balanced representation (6–11%). From an application perspective, the primary use of UAVs in geoscience included soil mapping (19.6%), landslide/subsidence mapping (17.2%), and near-surface object detection (13.5%). The reviewed studies consistently highlight the advantages of UAV RS in geophysical surveys. UAV geophysical RS effectively balances the benefits of ground-based and traditional RS methods regarding cost, resolution, accuracy, and other factors. Integrating multiple sensors on a single platform and fusion of multi-source data enhance efficiency in geoscientific analysis. However, implementing geophysical methods on UAVs poses challenges, prompting ongoing research and development efforts worldwide to find optimal solutions from both hardware and software perspectives.

Most of the existing pan-sharpening quality assessment methods consider only the spectral quality and there are just few investigations, which concentrate on spatial characteristics. Spatial quality of pan-sharpened images is vital in elaborating the capability of object extraction, identification, or reconstruction, especially regarding man-made objects and their application for large scale mapping in urban areas. This paper presents an Edge based image Fusion Metric (EFM) for spatial quality evaluation of pan-sharpening in high resolution satellite imagery. Considering Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) as a precise measurement of edge response, MTFs of pan-sharpened images are assessed and compared to those obtained from the original multispectral or panchromatic images. Spatial quality assessment of pan-sharpening is done by comparison of MTF curves of the pan-sharpened and reference images. The capability of the proposed method is evaluated by quality assessment of two different residential and industrial urban areas of WorldView-2 pan-sharpened images. Obtained results clearly show the wide spatial discrepancy in quality of Pan-sharpened images, resulting from different fusion methods, and confirm the need for spatial quality assessment of fused products. The results also prove the capability of the proposed EFM as a powerful tool for evaluation and comparison of different image fusion techniques and products.