Automatic target detection in UAV imagery using image formation conditions

Abstract

This paper is about automatic target detection (ATD) in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery. Extracting reliable features under all conditions from a 2D projection of a target in UAV imagery is a difficult problem. However, since the target size information is usually invariant to the image formation proces, we propose an algorithm for automatically estimating the size of a 3D target by using its 2D projection. The size information in turn becomes an important feature to be used in a knowledge-driven, multi-resolution-based algorithm for automatically detecting targets in UAV imagery. Experimental results show that our proposed ATD algorithm provides outstanding detection performance, while significantly reducing the false alarm rate and the computational complexity.