1,373 research outputs found
A Comprehensive Review on Computer Vision Analysis of Aerial Data
With the emergence of new technologies in the field of airborne platforms and
imaging sensors, aerial data analysis is becoming very popular, capitalizing on
its advantages over land data. This paper presents a comprehensive review of
the computer vision tasks within the domain of aerial data analysis. While
addressing fundamental aspects such as object detection and tracking, the
primary focus is on pivotal tasks like change detection, object segmentation,
and scene-level analysis. The paper provides the comparison of various hyper
parameters employed across diverse architectures and tasks. A substantial
section is dedicated to an in-depth discussion on libraries, their
categorization, and their relevance to different domain expertise. The paper
encompasses aerial datasets, the architectural nuances adopted, and the
evaluation metrics associated with all the tasks in aerial data analysis.
Applications of computer vision tasks in aerial data across different domains
are explored, with case studies providing further insights. The paper
thoroughly examines the challenges inherent in aerial data analysis, offering
practical solutions. Additionally, unresolved issues of significance are
identified, paving the way for future research directions in the field of
aerial data analysis.Comment: 112 page
Unmanned Aerial Systems for Wildland and Forest Fires
Wildfires represent an important natural risk causing economic losses, human
death and important environmental damage. In recent years, we witness an
increase in fire intensity and frequency. Research has been conducted towards
the development of dedicated solutions for wildland and forest fire assistance
and fighting. Systems were proposed for the remote detection and tracking of
fires. These systems have shown improvements in the area of efficient data
collection and fire characterization within small scale environments. However,
wildfires cover large areas making some of the proposed ground-based systems
unsuitable for optimal coverage. To tackle this limitation, Unmanned Aerial
Systems (UAS) were proposed. UAS have proven to be useful due to their
maneuverability, allowing for the implementation of remote sensing, allocation
strategies and task planning. They can provide a low-cost alternative for the
prevention, detection and real-time support of firefighting. In this paper we
review previous work related to the use of UAS in wildfires. Onboard sensor
instruments, fire perception algorithms and coordination strategies are
considered. In addition, we present some of the recent frameworks proposing the
use of both aerial vehicles and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UV) for a more
efficient wildland firefighting strategy at a larger scale.Comment: A recent published version of this paper is available at:
https://doi.org/10.3390/drones501001
Computer Vision Applications for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles
Undoubtedly, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have experienced a great leap forward over the last decade. It is not surprising anymore to see a UAV being used to accomplish a certain task, which was previously carried out by humans or a former technology. The proliferation of special vision sensors, such as depth cameras, lidar sensors and thermal cameras, and major breakthroughs in computer vision and machine learning fields accelerated the advance of UAV research and technology. However, due to certain unique challenges imposed by UAVs, such as limited payload capacity, unreliable communication link with the ground stations and data safety, UAVs are compelled to perform many tasks on their onboard embedded processing units, which makes it difficult to readily implement the most advanced algorithms on UAVs. This thesis focuses on computer vision and machine learning applications for UAVs equipped with onboard embedded platforms, and presents algorithms that utilize data from multiple modalities. The presented work covers a broad spectrum of algorithms and applications for UAVs, such as indoor UAV perception, 3D understanding with deep learning, UAV localization, and structural inspection with UAVs.
Visual guidance and scene understanding without relying on pre-installed tags or markers is the desired approach for fully autonomous navigation of UAVs in conjunction with the global positioning systems (GPS), or especially when GPS information is either unavailable or unreliable. Thus, semantic and geometric understanding of the surroundings become vital to utilize vision as guidance in the autonomous navigation pipelines. In this context, first, robust altitude measurement, safe landing zone detection and doorway detection methods are presented for autonomous UAVs operating indoors. These approaches are implemented on Google Project Tango platform, which is an embedded platform equipped with various sensors including a depth camera. Next, a modified capsule network for 3D object classification is presented with weight optimization so that the network can be fit and run on memory-constrained platforms. Then, a semantic segmentation method for 3D point clouds is developed for a more general visual perception on a UAV equipped with a 3D vision sensor.
Next, this thesis presents algorithms for structural health monitoring applications involving UAVs. First, a 3D point cloud-based, drift-free and lightweight localization method is presented for depth camera-equipped UAVs that perform bridge inspection, where GPS signal is unreliable. Next, a thermal leakage detection algorithm is presented for detecting thermal anomalies on building envelopes using aerial thermography from UAVs. Then, building on our thermal anomaly identification expertise gained on the previous task, a novel performance anomaly identification metric (AIM) is presented for more reliable performance evaluation of thermal anomaly identification methods
Deep Learning-Based Object Detection in Maritime Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery: Review and Experimental Comparisons
With the advancement of maritime unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and deep
learning technologies, the application of UAV-based object detection has become
increasingly significant in the fields of maritime industry and ocean
engineering. Endowed with intelligent sensing capabilities, the maritime UAVs
enable effective and efficient maritime surveillance. To further promote the
development of maritime UAV-based object detection, this paper provides a
comprehensive review of challenges, relative methods, and UAV aerial datasets.
Specifically, in this work, we first briefly summarize four challenges for
object detection on maritime UAVs, i.e., object feature diversity, device
limitation, maritime environment variability, and dataset scarcity. We then
focus on computational methods to improve maritime UAV-based object detection
performance in terms of scale-aware, small object detection, view-aware,
rotated object detection, lightweight methods, and others. Next, we review the
UAV aerial image/video datasets and propose a maritime UAV aerial dataset named
MS2ship for ship detection. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experiments to
present the performance evaluation and robustness analysis of object detection
methods on maritime datasets. Eventually, we give the discussion and outlook on
future works for maritime UAV-based object detection. The MS2ship dataset is
available at
\href{https://github.com/zcj234/MS2ship}{https://github.com/zcj234/MS2ship}.Comment: 32 pages, 18 figure
Sea-Surface Object Detection Based on Electro-Optical Sensors: A Review
Sea-surface object detection is critical for navigation safety of autonomous ships. Electrooptical (EO) sensors, such as video cameras, complement radar on board in detecting small obstacle
sea-surface objects. Traditionally, researchers have used horizon detection, background subtraction, and
foreground segmentation techniques to detect sea-surface objects. Recently, deep learning-based object
detection technologies have been gradually applied to sea-surface object detection. This article demonstrates a comprehensive overview of sea-surface object-detection approaches where the advantages
and drawbacks of each technique are compared, covering four essential aspects: EO sensors and image
types, traditional object-detection methods, deep learning methods, and maritime datasets collection. In
particular, sea-surface object detections based on deep learning methods are thoroughly analyzed and
compared with highly influential public datasets introduced as benchmarks to verify the effectiveness of
these approaches. The arti
Efficient Semantic Segmentation on Edge Devices
Semantic segmentation works on the computer vision algorithm for assigning
each pixel of an image into a class. The task of semantic segmentation should
be performed with both accuracy and efficiency. Most of the existing deep FCNs
yield to heavy computations and these networks are very power hungry,
unsuitable for real-time applications on portable devices. This project
analyzes current semantic segmentation models to explore the feasibility of
applying these models for emergency response during catastrophic events. We
compare the performance of real-time semantic segmentation models with
non-real-time counterparts constrained by aerial images under oppositional
settings. Furthermore, we train several models on the Flood-Net dataset,
containing UAV images captured after Hurricane Harvey, and benchmark their
execution on special classes such as flooded buildings vs. non-flooded
buildings or flooded roads vs. non-flooded roads. In this project, we developed
a real-time UNet based model and deployed that network on Jetson AGX Xavier
module
A Review on Deep Learning in UAV Remote Sensing
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) learn representation from data with an impressive
capability, and brought important breakthroughs for processing images,
time-series, natural language, audio, video, and many others. In the remote
sensing field, surveys and literature revisions specifically involving DNNs
algorithms' applications have been conducted in an attempt to summarize the
amount of information produced in its subfields. Recently, Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAV) based applications have dominated aerial sensing research.
However, a literature revision that combines both "deep learning" and "UAV
remote sensing" thematics has not yet been conducted. The motivation for our
work was to present a comprehensive review of the fundamentals of Deep Learning
(DL) applied in UAV-based imagery. We focused mainly on describing
classification and regression techniques used in recent applications with
UAV-acquired data. For that, a total of 232 papers published in international
scientific journal databases was examined. We gathered the published material
and evaluated their characteristics regarding application, sensor, and
technique used. We relate how DL presents promising results and has the
potential for processing tasks associated with UAV-based image data. Lastly, we
project future perspectives, commentating on prominent DL paths to be explored
in the UAV remote sensing field. Our revision consists of a friendly-approach
to introduce, commentate, and summarize the state-of-the-art in UAV-based image
applications with DNNs algorithms in diverse subfields of remote sensing,
grouping it in the environmental, urban, and agricultural contexts.Comment: 38 pages, 10 figure
Robust Correlation Tracking for UAV with Feature Integration and Response Map Enhancement
Recently, correlation filter (CF)-based tracking algorithms have attained extensive interest in the field of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking. Nonetheless, existing trackers still struggle with selecting suitable features and alleviating the model drift issue for online UAV tracking. In this paper, a robust CF-based tracker with feature integration and response map enhancement is proposed. Concretely, we develop a novel feature integration method that comprehensively describes the target by leveraging auxiliary gradient information extracted from the binary representation. Subsequently, the integrated features are utilized to learn a background-aware correlation filter (BACF) for generating a response map that implies the target location. To mitigate the risk of model drift, we introduce saliency awareness in the BACF framework and further propose an adaptive response fusion strategy to enhance the discriminating capability of the response map. Moreover, a dynamic model update mechanism is designed to prevent filter contamination and maintain tracking stability. Experiments on three public benchmarks verify that the proposed tracker outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms and achieves a real-time tracking speed, which can be applied in UAV tracking scenarios efficiently
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