July 9, 2020

Drones

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Drones are interesting vehicles which have been developed rapidly in the recent years. From a data standpoint it is interesting to see what data a drone can generate. For instance, a drone can be used to inspect industrial plants or monitor rooftops and save the camera footage. This camera footage can be used by us to potentially automatically detect all kinds of situations.

We experimented with this by generating camera footage using a large drone. To check whether this footage is suitable for analysis, we ran the footage through a publicly available trained Deep Neural Network. This first test seemed promising, the initial model could already detect certain objects in the footage, however, with low precision.

In the future, we are going to brainstorm on possible use cases involving drones. Options include damage detection, corrosion detection, parking space detection, autonomous flight, road inspection, or traffic congestion analysis.