An Image Processing Based Classifier to Support Safe Dropping for Delivery-by-Drone

Autonomous delivery-by-drone of packages is an active area of research and commercial development. However, the assessment of safe dropping/ delivery zones has received limited attention. Ensuring that the dropping zone is a safe area for dropping, and continues to stay safe during the dropping process is key to safe delivery. This paper proposes a simple and fast classifier to assess the safety of a designated dropping zone before and during the dropping operation, using a single onboard camera. This classifier is, as far as we can tell, the first to address the problem of safety assessment at the point of delivery-by-drone. Experimental results on recorded drone videos show that the proposed classifier provides both average precision and average recall of 97% in our test scenarios.