End-to-end controls using K-means algorithm for 360-degree video control method on omnidirectional camera-equipped autonomous micro unmanned aircraft systems

Micro unmanned aircraft systems (micro UAS)-related technical research is important because micro UAS has the advantage of being able to perform missions remotely. When an omnidirectional camera is mounted, it captures all surrounding areas of the micro UAS. Normal field of view (NFoV) refers to a view presented as an image to a user in a 360-degree video. The 360-degree video is controlled using an end-to-end controls method to automatically provide the user with NFoVs without the user controlling the 360-degree video. When using the end-to-end controls method that controls 360-degree video, if there are various signals that control the 360-degree video, the training of the deep learning model requires a considerable amount of training data. Therefore, there is a need for a method of autonomously determining the signals to reduce the number of signals for controlling the 360-degree video. This paper proposes a method to autonomously determine the output to be used for end-to-end control-based deep learning model to control 360-degree video for micro UAS controllers. The output of the deep learning model to control 360-degree video is automatically determined using the K-means algorithm. Using a trained deep learning model, the user is presented with NFoVs in a 360-degree video. The proposed method was experimentally verified by providing NFoVs wherein the signals that control the 360-degree video were set by the proposed method and by user definition. The results of training the convolution neural network (CNN) model using the signals to provide NFoVs were compared, and the proposed method provided NFoVs similar to NFoVs of existing user with 24.4% more similarity compared to a user-defined approach.