Resilient UAV Autonomy and Remote Sensing: 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

The success of the MDPI Drones Special Issue “Resilient UAV Autonomy and Remote Sensing” led us to propose this new edition, for which we are pleased to invite you to submit original contributions.

With the development of aerial imaging, oblique photogrammetry, laser scanning techniques, and unmanned aircraft systems (UAVs), the fields of photogrammetry and computer vision have become focused on research regarding accurate and efficient perception and the reconstruction and recognition of large-scale 3D scenes. However, there are still several problems that need to be urgently solved, such as a low processing efficiency, difficulty in rendering the details of objects, and the poor robustness of dense 3D reconstructions for poorly textured and occluded areas. Motivated by this rapid development, we are excited to invite you to submit a research paper to this Special Issue of Drones titled “UAV Image and LiDAR Processing”. UAV data, including primarily UAV images and LiDAR data, have been widely used in aerial surveillance, 3D reconstruction and visualization, autonomous driving, and smart cities. This Special Issue aims to promote the further application of UAV data, specifically in the fields of instance segmentation, object detection/tracking, SLAM, SFM, MVS, 3D mesh surface reconstruction, etc. Original submissions aligned with the above-mentioned research areas are highly welcomed.

Papers are welcomed from all fields directly related to these topics, including but not limited to the following:

• Trajectory planning for UAV data acquisition;
• The fusion of UAV sensor data (image/point clouds/GNSS/IMU);
• The registration of UAV image/point clouds;
• Real-time AI in motion planning and the control, data gathering, and analysis of UAVs;
• Image/LiDAR feature extraction, matching and bundle adjustment between UAV and UGV;
• Semantic/instance segmentation, classification, object detection, and tracking with UAV data using the deep learning method;
• 3D reconstructions from UAV image/point clouds;
• SfM and SLAM using UAVs image/LiDAR data;
• Cooperative perception and mapping utilizing multiple UAVs and UGVs;
• Mobile edge computing (MEC) in UAVs;
• UAV image/point clouds processing in inspection, surveillance, GNSS-denied environment (underground/indoor spaces), etc.;
• UAV image/point clouds processing in power/oil/ industry, hydraulics, agriculture, ecology, emergency response, and smart cities.

Dr. Chi Chen
Dr. San Jiang
Dr. Xijiang Chen
Dr. Mao Tian
Dr. Jianping Li
Dr. Jian Zhou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Drones is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• drones
• UAV
• UAV swarm
• computer vision
• photogrammetry
• remote sensing
• LiDAR
• aerial imagery
• image and point cloud fusion
• detection and tracking
• segmentation
• SLAM
• path planning
• 3D reconstruction
• 3D visualization