Ground Vehicle Detection and Classification by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

Abstract-Rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are being widely used in different applications due to its several features, such as mobility, lightweight, embedded processing and capability of flying in different height levels. Among the possible applications they are used in surveillance tasks, agriculture environments monitoring, power lines inspections and diseases detection in crops. The images captured by the UAVs need to be examined in most of the applications. This analysis is usually done by experts, but a system that process the captured images in a autonomous way can speed up the results and more images can be processed in a lesser period, which is the ideal for real time applications. This work presents a system for vehicle detection aiming at surveillance task. The system is evaluated in terms of precision of detection of a particular type of vehicle. The video was shot using a monocular camera coupled with an aerial robot developed in our Lab. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can be used for the vehicles tracking task under controlled conditions.

Review: Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as Mobile Sensing Platforms (MSPs) for Disaster Response, Civil Security and Public Safety

“…As such, they can operate in three spacial dimensions (i.e., get close to objects even if these are at a distance from the ground, assume elevated positions above locations or objects of interest and chose their position on the basis of it being sustainable and not affecting other participants of smart city operations), are not restricted by congested networks on the ground and can autonomously adapt their exact location and the settings of their sensors to deliver the best possible service. Platform mounted sensors can contribute to public safety in the areas of imagery [65,74,75], monitoring [34,40,53,69,74,[76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88] and surveillance [34,40,46,48,53,78,82,87,[89][90][91]].…”

“…As already mentioned, UAVs serving as mobile sensing platforms can perform a wide variety of sensing tasks, essentially limited only by the sensors that can be mounted to the platform. As such, the use of UAVs for a broad range of surveillance tasks has been suggested in the literature [40,48,82,87,[89][90][91], covering the areas of urban surveillance [46], aerial surveillance [53], border surveillance [34] and tracking and surveillance tasks in general [78]. Furthermore, there is significant literature on the use of UAVs for monitoring purposes [34,40,74,[80][81][82]86,98] which can be as diverse as the monitoring of infrastructure [88], specifically pipelines [76] but also of personal [69] and, in case of disasters, victims [83].…”

“…The potential of drones' actuation capabilities has especially been mentioned in the context of handling or recovering hazardous material [78]. In addition, and a logical extension to the monitoring capabilities, damage assessment [68] and inspection and repair operations [90] such as power lines inspection [91], power grid inspection [81,86] and infrastructure inspection [41,86,88,99,101] have been performed by UAVs by employing their autonomous manipulation capabilities [94]. Finally, as mentioned above, logistic operations [81] are widely discussed, with package delivery [33,34,80] already being trailed by major logistic and retail operators such as Amazon, DHL etc.…”

“…UAVs are mobile [61,70,88] and airborne [91] and hence, offer a number of advantages for the application scenarios mentioned above. Regarding sensing-focused applications such as monitoring, surveillance or real-time data-driven situational awareness, their mobility [91], ability to operate in 3D environments [61], relatively light weight [91] and their potential to cover large areas and distances [34,53,94] makes them ideal candidates for mobile/aerial urban sensing platforms [46,53].…”

“…Regarding sensing-focused applications such as monitoring, surveillance or real-time data-driven situational awareness, their mobility [91], ability to operate in 3D environments [61], relatively light weight [91] and their potential to cover large areas and distances [34,53,94] makes them ideal candidates for mobile/aerial urban sensing platforms [46,53]. In the context of providing services UAVs increasingly provide on-board decision making capabilities [66] through sometimes significant embedded processing power [91], making it possible to use them for complex operations such as e.g., the inspection of urban structure (such as bridges) [94] or to create 3D models of urban locations [65] and in environments where the connectivity is limited. In the context of hazardous operations, UAVs have the advantage of being expendable (i.e., not humans) [88] and have been used to assist human personnel on the ground [65,96,97].…”