Real-Time Detection and Recognition of Multiple Moving Objects for Aerial Surveillance

System-Level Performance Analysis of Cooperative Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Wildfire Surveillance Using Agent-Based Modeling

In this paper, we propose an agent-based approach for the evaluation of Multiple Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (MUAV) wildfire monitoring systems for remote and hard-to-reach areas. Emerging environmental factors are causing a higher number of wildfires and keeping these fires in check is becoming a global challenge. MUAV deployment for the monitoring and surveillance of potential fires has already been established. However, most of the scholarly work is still focused on MUAV operations details. In wildfire surveillance and monitoring, evaluations of the system-level performance in terms of the analysis of the effects of individual behavior on system surveillance has yet to be established. Especially in an MUAV system, the individual and cooperative behaviors of the team affect the overall performance of the system. Such systems are dynamic and stochastic because of an ever-changing environment. Quantifying the emergent system behavior and general performance measures of such a system by analytical methods is challenging. In our work, we present an agent-based model for MUAV surveillance missions. This paper focuses on the overall system performance of cooperative UAVs performing forest fire surveillance. The principal theme is to present the effects of three behaviors on overall performance: (1) the area allocation and (2) dynamic coverage, and (3) the effects of forest density on team allocation. For area allocation, three behaviors are simulated: (1) randomized, (2) two-layer barrier sweep coverage, and (3) full sweep coverage. For dynamic coverage, the effects of communication and resource unavailability during the mission are studied by analyzing the agent’s downtime spent on refueling. Last, an extensive simulation is carried out on wildfire models with varying forest density. It is found that cooperative complete sweep coverage strategies perform better than the rest and the performance of the team is greatly affected by the forest density.

Evaluation and Selection of Video Stabilization Techniques for UAV-Based Active Infrared Thermography Application

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that can fly around an aircraft carrying several sensors, e.g., thermal and optical cameras, to inspect the parts of interest without removing them can have significant impact in reducing inspection time and cost. One of the main challenges in the UAV based active InfraRed Thermography (IRT) inspection is the UAV’s unexpected motions. Since active thermography is mainly concerned with the analysis of thermal sequences, unexpected motions can disturb the thermal profiling and cause data misinterpretation especially for providing an automated process pipeline of such inspections. Additionally, in the scenarios where post-analysis is intended to be applied by an inspector, the UAV’s unexpected motions can increase the risk of human error, data misinterpretation, and incorrect characterization of possible defects. Therefore, post-processing is required to minimize/eliminate such undesired motions using digital video stabilization techniques. There are number of video stabilization algorithms that are readily available; however, selecting the best suited one is also challenging. Therefore, this paper evaluates video stabilization algorithms to minimize/mitigate undesired UAV motion and proposes a simple method to find the best suited stabilization algorithm as a fundamental first step towards a fully operational UAV-IRT inspection system.

Digital Signal, Image and Video Processing for Emerging Multimedia Technology

Recent developments in image/video-based deep learning technology have enabled new services in the field of multimedia and recognition technology [...]

A Novel Changing Athlete Body Real-Time Visual Tracking Algorithm Based on Distractor-Aware SiamRPN and HOG-SVM

Athlete detection in sports videos is a challenging task due to the dynamic and cluttered background. Distractor-aware SiamRPN (DaSiamRPN) has a simple network structure and can be utilized to perform long-term tracking of large data sets. However, similarly to the Siamese network, the tracking results heavily rely on the given position in the initial frame. Hence, there is a lack of solutions for some complex tracking scenarios, such as running and changing of bodies of athletes, especially in the stage from squatting to standing to running. The Haar feature-based cascade classifier is involved to catch the key frame, representing the video frame of the most dramatic changes of the athletes. DaSiamRPN is implemented as the tracking method. In each frame after the key frame, a detection window is given based on the bounding box generated by the DaSiamRPN tracker. In the new detection window, a fusion method (HOG-SVM) combining features of Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and a linear Support-Vector Machine (SVM) is proposed for detecting the athlete, and the tracking results are updated in real-time by fusing the tracking results of DaSiamRPN and HOG-SVM. Our proposed method has reached a stable and accurate tracking effect in testing on men’s 100 m video sequences and has realized real-time operation.