  The past few decades have witnessed the great progress of unmanned aircraft
vehicles (UAVs) in civilian fields, especially in photogrammetry and remote
sensing. In contrast with the platforms of manned aircraft and satellite, the
UAV platform holds many promising characteristics: flexibility, efficiency,
high-spatial/temporal resolution, low cost, easy operation, etc., which make it
an effective complement to other remote-sensing platforms and a cost-effective
means for remote sensing. Considering the popularity and expansion of UAV-based
remote sensing in recent years, this paper provides a systematic survey on the
recent advances and future prospectives of UAVs in the remote-sensing
community. Specifically, the main challenges and key technologies of
remote-sensing data processing based on UAVs are discussed and summarized
firstly. Then, we provide an overview of the widespread applications of UAVs in
remote sensing. Finally, some prospects for future work are discussed. We hope
this paper will provide remote-sensing researchers an overall picture of recent
UAV-based remote sensing developments and help guide the further research on
this topic.
