This disclosure relates to transmitting video from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to a ground control station.

There is an increasing use of UAVs in precision agriculture in an effort to improve farming management through the use of video or images captured by the UAV. In the case of video, the video can be stored on the UAV which is then accessed when the UAV lands for viewing and analysis of the video. In some applications, low or no latency video feeds are desirable in order to permit substantially real-time viewing of the video being captured by the UAV as the UAV is in flight.

Systems and methods are described where a ground control station in communication with a UAV can render a low latency (but possibly lossy), real-time video captured by the UAV, or render a substantially lossless, reconstructed version of the video stream, depending upon a video latency period selected by a user. If the ground control station determines that packets are missing from the video stream received from the UAV, and the ground control station thereafter receives the missing packets from the UAV within the selected video latency period, the ground control station can render the reconstructed, substantially lossless video stream. Alternatively, if the ground control station receives the missing packets from the UAV outside of the selected video latency period, the ground control station can render the received real-time (but possibly lossy) video stream, and the ground control station stores the reconstructed, substantially lossless video stream for later rendering.