Boosting UAVs live uplink streaming by video stabilization

The high-impact scenario of UAV live uplink streaming is gaining significant interest in diverse applications, such as ambient monitoring, disaster rescue, and smart surveillance. This paper addresses the problem of uplink streaming by a fleet of camera-equipped UAVs, with one UAV acting as the sink, collecting and transmitting videos from the others. We demonstrate that performing video stabilization at the source UAVs or the sink enhances video quality and reduces required communication throughput, leading to bandwidth savings. We analyze the UAV live uplink streaming architecture to identify the most effective stabilization point within the network in a distributed manner. Using a reinforcement learning framework, we develop a method to dynamically optimize the stabilization gain-cost trade-off, pinpointing the optimal node for stabilization tasks. Through targeted numerical simulations under different system conditions we identify when and where stabilization should be applied to maximize efficiency. Our results show that video stabilization improves system performance in terms of media quality, battery life, and bandwidth usage.