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 paper, 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 on-board camera. Specifically, we first present our own AQI recognition approach based on the physical formation 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 2D 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 …