Prioritized data transmission in airborne camera networks for wide area surveillance and image mosaicking

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an emerging research area and we equip these with high resolution cameras and build a wireless network for wide area surveillance. The sensed telemetry data and images are processed on-board in a distributed manner to generate an orthographic mosaick and augment with sensed data. In this work we present a prioritized data transmission scheme for a wireless network of mobile aerial camera nodes for wide area surveillance. The goal of this protocol is to transfer the telemetry data, mosaicking data and images efficiently over the limited wireless network such that an overview image can be generated incrementally. Our experiments with up to four UAVs demonstrate very short delays for the final mosaick, due to the prioritization by the network protocol. Low resolution image data and meta data for mosaicking is prioritized over the full sized image data.