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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1167-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>GCP Deployment and Recognition System based on Light-Marker UAV</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Ruikai</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wan</surname>
<given-names>Yi</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wei</surname>
<given-names>Dong</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Yongjun</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Huang</surname>
<given-names>Ziqian</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Xiaotong</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhu</surname>
<given-names>Changjun</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>WHU, School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, 430079, Wuhan, Hubei, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>23</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B2-2026</volume>
<fpage>1167</fpage>
<lpage>1174</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Ruikai Li et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/1167/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1167-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/1167/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1167-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/1167/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1167-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/1167/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1167-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>This paper addresses the heavy reliance on manual operations in control point acquisition for UAV photogrammetry and proposes an encoded control point deployment and recognition method based on a Light-Marker UAV (LMUAV). Conventional approaches rely on manual placement of control points and manual identification and measurement in images for aerial triangulation, resulting in low efficiency. To address this limitation, an LMUAV equipped with an LED array actively broadcasts its positional information as quaternary optical signals. The observing UAV performs coarse localization of the target region by integrating communication priors with the imaging model, followed by light spot segmentation and graph construction within the region of interest (ROI). Node correspondences are then recovered by constructing a template graph and an observation graph and applying Reweighted Random Walks (RRWM) graph matching. The matching robustness is further enhanced by incorporating directional point constraints and RANSAC-based geometric filtering. Based on the recovered correspondences, the encoded information is decoded through color recognition and validation, enabling automatic control point recovery. Experimental results in a cross-flight-line scenario with a single target UAV demonstrate that the proposed method achieves stable node matching and encoding&amp;ndash;decoding, with a sequence-level accuracy of 76.32%, and a final effective decoding rate of 71.05%, while maintaining centimeter-level positioning accuracy, thereby validating its effectiveness for automatic control point acquisition in UAV mapping.</p>
</abstract>
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