Vision and Control for UAVs: A Survey of General Methods and of Inexpensive Platforms for Infrastructure Inspection

综述可用于低成本无人机的视觉与控制方法（特征跟踪、光流、视觉伺服、稳像、规划），重点关注基础设施巡检。文章设定了两个铁路巡检用例，并在一架小型消费级无人机上测试了选定的技术：近距离的目标检测与靠近结构物的定位，以及利用钢轨消失点的远距离轨道跟随。

主要发现

• FAST keypoints with SIFT descriptors chosen for target detection; FAST/Shi-Tomasi ran under 10 ms per frame
• Rail detection ran at about 40-50 Hz including line extraction, with average vanishing-point error below 2.5% of image width
• Laplacian edge detection chosen over Canny for fewer false detections

局限

• Parameters tuned on the authors' own small image sets (50 and 165 images)
• Consumer GPS (~2 m) judged too coarse for safe flight close to structures
• No general obstacle-avoidance solution; battery and regulation limit operations