A method of waypoint selection in aerial images for vision navigation

We present a novel method to select waypoints from aerial images of candidate flying regions via matching suitability analysis, which is based on visual attention mechanism and feature attribute classification. At first, visual attention mechanism is used to get the saliency map of the initial image by low-rank recovery and sparse coding. The salient regions are selected to be as preparatory results with threshold constraint and nonmaxima suppression. Then we use support vector machine (SVM) to divide the preparatory results into two classes for suitable or unsuitable waypoints based on their feature attributes, which can be represented by two edge-based descriptors and two correlation-based descriptors. The experimental results show that the proposed method is valid and effective.