Online Planning for Sparse Ground Target Search from a High-Altitude UAV under Partial Observability
The work formulates searching for small, hidden ground targets by a high-altitude UAV using Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) operation as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). It uses POMCP planning to guide PTZ actions based on an uncertain belief state. The model explicitly incorporates observation uncertainty related to the target's scale and uses selective ensemble detection for enhanced reasoning.