Mobile communication base station antenna measurement using unmanned aerial vehicle

Traditional base station antenna measurement methods conducted with professional worker climbing towers tend to raise safety and inefficiency concerns in practical application. Designed to address the above problems, this paper proposes an intelligent and fully automatic antenna measurement unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system for mobile communication base station. Firstly, an antenna database, containing 19,715 images, named UAV-Antenna is constructed by image capturing with the help of UAVs flying around various base stations. Secondly, Mask R-CNN is adopted to train an optimal instance segmentation model on UAV-Antenna. Then, pixel coordinates and threshold are utilized for measuring antenna quantity and separate all antenna data for further measuring. Finally, a least squares method is employed for measuring antenna parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed method can not only satisfy the industry application standards, but also guarantee safety of labors and efficiency of performance.