Surf points based Moving Target Detection and Long-term Tracking in Aerial Videos

Abstract

A novel method based on Surf points is proposed to detect and lock-track single ground target in aerial videos. Videos captured by moving cameras contain complex motions, which bring difficulty in moving object detection. Our approach contains three parts: moving target template detection, search area estimation and target tracking. Global motion estimation and compensation are first made by grids-sampling Surf points selecting and matching. And then, the single ground target is detected by joint spatial-temporal information processing. The temporal process is made by calculating difference between compensated reference and current image and the spatial process is implementing morphological operations and adaptive binarization. The second part improves KALMAN filter with surf points scale information to predict target position and search area adaptively. Lastly, the local Surf points of target template are matched in this search region to realize target tracking. The long-term tracking is updated following target scaling, occlusion and large deformation. Experimental results show that the algorithm can correctly detect small moving target in dynamic scenes with complex motions. It is robust to vehicle dithering and target scale changing, rotation, especially partial occlusion or temporal complete occlusion. Comparing with traditional algorithms, our method enables real time operation, processing 520×390 frames at around 15fps.