IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2019 - 55

In this article, we systematically reviewed the current status of UAVs in the remote sensing community, including
UAV-based data processing, applications, current trends,
and future prospects. Some conclusions can be drawn from
this survey.
◗ The inspiring advances in UAV platforms and miniaturized sensors have allowed UAV-RS to meet critical
spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution requirements,
offering a powerful supplement to other remote sensing platforms. UAV-RS has many advantages in accommodating the ever-increasing demand for small-area,
timely, and fine surveying and mapping.
◗ Because of the characteristics of UAV platforms, many
specialized data processing technologies have been designed for UAV-RS. Technologically speaking, UAV-RS
is mature enough to support the development of generic geoinformation products and services. With recent
progress in artificial intelligence (e.g., deep learning)
and robotics, UAV-RS will likely experience a tremendous technological leap toward automatic, efficient, and
intelligent services.
◗ Many current versions of UAV-RS data processing software are commercially available, and developments in
UAV-RS technology are continuing apace, all of which
will promote the growth of related applications.
Challenges still exist and hinder UAV-RS progress. Much
additional research is required, which is being performed
with the advantage of low entrance barriers. The rapid advancement of UAV-RS seems to be unstoppable, and more
new technologies and applications in the area will surely
appear in coming years.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grants 61771350,
61871299, and 41820104006 and in part by the Outstanding Youth Project of Hubei Province under contract
2017CFA037.
AUTHOR INFORMATION

ing as a full professor in computer vision and photogrammetry at Wuhan University, China. He was also a visiting
scholar with Département de Mathématiques et Applications, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, for two months in
2018. His research interests include mathematical modeling of images and videos, structure from motion, perceptual grouping, and remote sensing imaging. He serves on
the editorial boards of Pattern Recognition, Signal Processing:
Image Communications, and EURASIP Journal on Image and
Video Processing. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.
Liangpei Zhang (zlp62@whu.edu.cn) received his B.S.
degree in physics from Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China, in 1982; his M.S. degree in optics from the
Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, in 1988; and his Ph.D. degree in photogrammetry and remote sensing from Wuhan University,
China, in 1998. He is currently the head of the Remote
Sensing Division, State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing,
Wuhan University. He is also a Chang-Jiang Scholar chair
professor, appointed by the Ministry of Education of China.
He has more than 500 research papers and five books to his
credit and holds 15 patents. He currently serves as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote
Sensing. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

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Tian-Zhu Xiang (tzxiang@whu.edu.cn) received his B.S.

and M.S. degrees in photogrammetry and remote sensing
from Wuhan University, China, in 2012 and 2015, respectively. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree at
the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in
Surveying, Mapping, and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University. His research interests include low-level computer vision and computational photography.
Gui-Song Xia (guisong.xia@whu.edu.cn) received his
Ph.D. degree in image processing and computer vision
from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
(CNRS) Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de
l'Information, Télécom ParisTech, France, in 2011. From
2011 to 2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher with the
Centre de Recherche en Mathématiques de la Decision,
CNRS, Paris-Dauphine University. He is currently workSEPTEMBER 2019

IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

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IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - September 2019

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