Antenna alignment by using computer vision technology

An automatic alignment approach is proposed for tracking unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) antennas by using computer vision technology. In this approach, UAV carries a low-gain omnidirectional antenna and a ground station uses high gain directional antenna which can be driven by a pan-tilt to point to UAV's antenna. A camera is bound together with the antenna and a computer is employed to recognize the video and control motion of the pan-tilt, so as to move the image of UAV's antenna toward the center of the whole picture. If the distance between center of UAV image and center of the picture is kept within a few pixels, then the antennas are aligned. Performance analysis and experiment results are given, showing that the proposed antenna autoalignment approach can achieve accurate alignment of the antennas with an angle error of less than 1 degrees.