Dynamic Target Tracking and Localization for Small UAV in Unstructured Outdoor Environment

Abstract

This paper presents a visual perception system of small UAVs for tracking and localization of dynamic targets to tackle the issues caused by occlusions and similar target interference. A DTC-Tracker module comprising detector, tracker and checker is designed to improve the tracking performance in cluttered outdoor environments. A dynamic tracking result checking and target recapture mechanism are proposed to adaptively invoke detector and checker for better tracking robustness and real time performance on onboard embedded computer. An onboard depth camera and visual odometry are incorporated to localize the dynamic target in UAV’s local coordinates. Experiments on a multirotor UAV platform were conducted to verify the effectiveness and investigate the performance proposed approach in a grove.