@misc{10481/72757,
year = {2021},
month = {12},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10481/72757},
abstract = {The use of unmanned aerial vehicles with multiple
onboard sensors has grown significantly in tasks involving terrain
coverage such as environmental and civil monitoring, disaster
management, and forest fire fighting. Many of these tasks require
a quick and early response, which makes maximizing the land
covered from the flight path a challenging objective, especially
when the area to bemonitored is irregular, large and includesmany
blind spots. Accordingly, state-of-the-art total viewshed algorithms
can be of great help to analyze large areas and find new paths
providing maximum visibility. This article shows how the total
viewshed computation is a valuable tool for generating paths that
provide maximum visibility during a flight. We introduce a new
heuristic called visibility-based path planning (VPP) that offers
a different solution to the path planning problem. VPP identifies
the hidden areas of the target territory to generate a path that
provides the highest visual coverage. Simulation results show that
VPP can cover up to 98.7% of theMontes deMalaga Natural Park
and 94.5% of the Sierra de las Nieves National Park, both located
within the province of Malaga (Spain) and chosen as regions of
interest. In addition, a real flight test confirmed the high visibility
achieved using VPP. Our methodology and analysis can be easily
applied to enhance monitoring in other large outdoor areas.},
organization = {Spanish Government	TIN2016-80920-R	
PID2019-105396RB-I00},
organization = {Regional Government of Andalusia within the Andalucia ERDF2014-20 Operational Programme	A-TIC-458-UGR18},
organization = {University of Malaga through the I Plan Propio de Investigacion},
publisher = {IEEE},
keywords = {Area coverage},
keywords = {Fire prevention},
keywords = {Monitoring path},
keywords = {Path planning},
keywords = {Total viewshed},
keywords = {Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)},
keywords = {Visibility analysis},
title = {VPP: Visibility-Based Path Planning Heuristic for Monitoring Large Regions of Complex Terrain Using a UAV Onboard Camera},
doi = {10.1109/JSTARS.2021.3134948},
author = {Sánchez Fernández, Andrés J. and Tabik, Siham},
}