Performance Assessment of Sky Segmentation Approaches for UAVs

Abstract

Image segmentation is one of the most challenging research fields for both image analysis and interpretation. The applications of image segmentation could be found as the primary step in various computer vision systems. Therefore, the choice of a reliable and accurate segmentation method represents a non-trivial task. Since the selected image segmentation method influences the overall performance of the remaining system steps, sky segmentation appears as a vital step for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) autonomous obstacle avoidance missions. In this paper, we are going to introduce a comprehensive literature survey of the different types of image segmentation methodology followed by a detailed illustration of the general-purpose methods and the state-of-art sky segmentation approaches. In addition, we introduce an improved version of our previously published work for sky segmentation purpose. The performance of the proposed sky segmentation approach is compared with various image segmentation approaches using different parameters and datasets. For performance assessment, we test our approach under different situations and compare its performance with commonly used approaches in terms of several assessment indexes. From the experimental results, the proposed method gives promising results compared with the other image segmentation approaches.