Comparison of Deep Learning and Cascade Classifiers Approaches for Object Detection in Autonomous UAV Landing

Autonomous landing is a key challenging in the domain of UAV navigation systems. Developing an autonomous landing system requires a precise estimation of the UAV pose relative to landing marker, particularly in vision systems this involves precise Helipad recognition. It seems that traditional approaches including cascade classifiers, image matching and segmentation techniques to have major challenges in different weather conditions and scales. On the other hand, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been introduced as a powerful tool in the visual recognition systems in the recent years but the high computational cost of this techniques, limited their performance in the low cost and light weight UAVs. The aim of this paper is to compare the convolutional neural networks and cascade classifier for helipad detection. The results show that CNNs are invariant under translation, rotation, scaling and occlusion. The detection accuracy of this method is 99.1 % which is 3 % more than cascade classifier while its running time is suitable for real time UAV applications.