AQ360: UAV-Aided Air Quality Monitoring by 360-Degree Aerial Panoramic Images in Urban Areas

Driven by the increasingly serious air pollution problem, nowadays different systems can be used to achieve the monitoring task of air quality index (AQI) in urban areas. In this article, we design a novel unmanned aerial vehicle-aided (UAV-aided) AQI monitoring system, called AQ360, which detects the air quality level from the 360-degree aerial panoramic images taken by the onboard camera. Specifically, we first present our own AQI recognition approach based on the physical form of the haze pictures, where the AQI is jointly decided by the images captured along six directions over the target location. Then, we study the UAV placement problem of selecting UAV's flight altitude and 2-D coordinates during the monitoring process. The objective is to save the system energy consumption while maintaining the accuracy of estimating AQI distribution. For practical considerations, we implement and evaluate the proposed system in real-world scenarios. The results show that our system can provide a lower AQI recognition error compared with existing vision-based monitoring approaches, and energy consumption is also reduced when applying for large-area tasks.