Have I Ever been to this Place? A SIFT Based Method for UAV

Flight duration is a key design issue for the monitoring applications based on the UAVs. Based on the assumption that UAVs often fly at a high altitude, the resolution of images captured by the UAVs is not high enough. Thus, the problem of positioning the UAV can be solved by image matching. When a UAV comes to a certain place that it has ever been to, there are the same objects in the images that it takes currently and a short time ago. We propose a text retrieval like method based on SIFT vectors for computation efficient in image matching. Experiments show that our method is good at discriminating between images taken at different places.