@article{abdollahzadehVisualSafetyMapping2026,

title = {Visual Safety Mapping for UAV Landings Using Ordinal Regression Networks},

author = {S. Abdollahzadeh and M. S. Allili and A. Boulmerka and J. -F. Lapointe},

url = {https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105023324811?origin=resultslist},

doi = {10.1109/TAI.2025.3635093},

issn = {26914581 (ISSN)},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-01-01},

journal = {IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence},

volume = {7},

number = {6},

pages = {3146–3159},

publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.},

abstract = {As uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) see growing use in civilian applications, reliably identifying safe landing zones (SLZs) in varied environments is essential for autonomous navigation and emergency response. Passive vision sensors offer a low cost, lightweight solution for real-time terrain analysis and 3D scene reconstruction, making them ideal for onboard systems. We introduce ordinal regression safe landing zones netwrok (OR-SLZNet), an original deep learning model based on ordinal regression to predict SLZs from UAV imagery. Unlike prior approaches, OR-SLZNet produces dense, multilevel safety maps by jointly leveraging photometric (e.g., color and texture) and geometric cues (e.g., flatness, slope, and depth), assigning each pixel an ordinal safety score that reflects landing suitability. With real-time inference (textbackslashsim0.02 s/frame), the model supports onboard deployment and rapid decision-making in time-critical situations. Extensive experiments on five diverse datasets demonstrate OR-SLZNet effectiveness and strong generalization across a wide range of structural complexities. © 2020 IEEE.},

keywords = {Aerial vehicle, Air navigation, Aircraft landing, Antennas, Automatic uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation, Automatic unmanned aerial vehicle navigation, Autonomous navigation, Behavioral research, Computer vision, decision making, Deep learning, deep ordinal regression, Emergency services, Landing zones, Learning systems, Ordinal regression, regression analysis, Safe landing, Safe landing zone, safe landing zones (SLZs), Semantic segmentation, Semantics, Textures, Three dimensional computer graphics, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), Vehicle navigation, Visual servoing},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}