UAS-based Multispectral Remote Sensing and NDVI Calculation for Post Disaster Assessment

This paper focuses on the use of unmanned aircraft system (UAS) for multispectral remote sensing in post disaster situation awareness and damage assessment applications. The KHawk UAS was developed as a test bed for multispectral aerial video acquisition. Efficient UAS flight planning, data acquisition, and post flight orthomosaic generation workflows are created to ensure the robustness of the overall remote sensing system. The generated 2D orthomaps and the accuracy analysis are presented for validation purposes. A robust normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) calibration procedure using ground reflectance targets and a pixel-level linear regression algorithm is proposed. The developed KHawk UAS and the proposed procedure is validated in a post tornado (EF2) damage assessment mission.