Security in networks of unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance with an agent-based approach inspired by the principles of blockchain

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can support surveillance even in areas without network infrastructure. However, UAV networks raise security challenges because of its dynamic topology. This paper proposes a technique for maintaining security in UAV networks in the context of surveillance, by corroborating information about events from different sources. In this way, UAV networks can conform peer-to-peer information inspired by the principles of blockchain, and detect compromised UAVs based on trust policies. The proposed technique uses a secure asymmetric encryption with a pre-shared list of official UAVs. Using this technique, the wrong information can be detected when an official UAV is physically hijacked. The novel agent based simulator ABS-SecurityUAV is used to validate the proposed approach. In our experiments, around 90% of UAVs were able to corroborate information about a person walking in a controlled area, while none of the UAVs corroborated fake information coming from a hijacked UAV

Ground-to-Aerial Person Search: Benchmark Dataset and Approach

In this work, we construct a large-scale dataset for Ground-to-Aerial Person Search, named G2APS, which contains 31,770 images of 260,559 annotated bounding boxes for 2,644 identities appearing in both of the UAVs and ground surveillance cameras. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset for cross-platform intelligent surveillance applications, where the UAVs could work as a powerful complement for the ground surveillance cameras. To more realistically simulate the actual cross-platform Ground-to-Aerial surveillance scenarios, the surveillance cameras are fixed about 2 meters above the ground, while the UAVs capture videos of persons at different location, with a variety of view-angles, flight attitudes and flight modes. Therefore, the dataset has the following unique characteristics: 1) drastic view-angle changes between query and gallery person images from cross-platform cameras; 2) diverse resolutions, poses and views of the person images under 9 rich real-world scenarios. On basis of the G2APS benchmark dataset, we demonstrate detailed analysis about current two-step and end-to-end person search methods, and further propose a simple yet effective knowledge distillation scheme on the head of the ReID network, which achieves state-of-the-art performances on both of the G2APS and the previous two public person search datasets, i.e., PRW and CUHK-SYSU. The dataset and source code available on \url{https://github.com/yqc123456/HKD_for_person_search}.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 202

The dawn of the age of the drones: an Australian privacy law perspective

Examines Australia\u27s privacy laws in relation to unmanned aerial vehicles, to identify deficiencies that may need to be addressed. Introduction Suppose a homeowner habitually enjoys sunbathing in his or her backyard, protected by a high fence from prying eyes, including those of an adolescent neighbour. In times past such homeowners could be assured that they might go about their activities without a threat to their privacy. However, recent years have seen technological advances in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (‘UAVs’), also known colloquially as drones, that have allowed them to become reduced in size, complexity and price. UAVs today include models retailing to the public for less than $350 and with an ease of operation that enables them to serve as mobile platforms for miniature cameras. These machines now mean that for individuals like the posited homeowner’s adolescent neighbour, barriers such as high fences no longer constitute insuperable obstacles to their voyeuristic endeavours. Moreover, ease of access to the internet and video sharing websites provides a ready means of sharing any recordings made with such cameras with a wide audience. Persons in the homeowner’s position might understandably seek some form of redress for such egregious invasions of their privacy. Other than some form of self-help, what alternative measures may be available? Under Australian law this problem yields no easy answer. In this country, a fractured landscape of common law, Commonwealth and state/territory legislation provides piecemeal protection against invasions of privacy by cameras mounted on UAVs. It is timely, at what may be regarded as the early days of the drone age, to consider these laws and to identify deficiencies that may need to be addressed lest, to quote words that are as apt today as they were when written over 120 years ago, ‘modern enterprise and invention … through invasions upon [their] privacy, [subject victims] to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.

How much does a man cost? A dirty, dull, and dangerous application

Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This study illuminates the many abilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). One area of importance includes the UAV's capability to assist in the development, implementation, and execution of crisis management. This research focuses on UAV uses in pre and post crisis planning and accomplishments. The accompaniment of unmanned vehicles with base teams can make crisis management plans more reliable for the general public and teams faced with tasks such as search and rescue and firefighting. In the fight for mass acceptance of UAV integration, knowledge and attitude inventories were collected and analyzed. Methodology includes mixed method research collected by interviews and questionnaires available to experts and ground teams in the UAV fields, mining industry, firefighting and police force career field, and general city planning crisis management members. This information was compiled to assist professionals in creation of general guidelines and recommendations for how to utilize UAVs in crisis management planning and implementation as well as integration of UAVs into the educational system. The results from this study show the benefits and disadvantages of strategically giving UAVs a role in the construction and implementation of crisis management plans and other areas of interest. The results also show that the general public is lacking information and education on the abilities of UAVs. This education gap shows a correlation with negative attitudes towards UAVs. Educational programs to teach the public benefits of UAV integration should be implemented

Smart environment monitoring through micro unmanned aerial vehicles

In recent years, the improvements of small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in terms of flight time, automatic control, and remote transmission are promoting the development of a wide range of practical applications. In aerial video surveillance, the monitoring of broad areas still has many challenges due to the achievement of different tasks in real-time, including mosaicking, change detection, and object detection. In this thesis work, a small-scale UAV based vision system to maintain regular surveillance over target areas is proposed. The system works in two modes. The first mode allows to monitor an area of interest by performing several flights. During the first flight, it creates an incremental geo-referenced mosaic of an area of interest and classifies all the known elements (e.g., persons) found on the ground by an improved Faster R-CNN architecture previously trained. In subsequent reconnaissance flights, the system searches for any changes (e.g., disappearance of persons) that may occur in the mosaic by a histogram equalization and RGB-Local Binary Pattern (RGB-LBP) based algorithm. If present, the mosaic is updated. The second mode, allows to perform a real-time classification by using, again, our improved Faster R-CNN model, useful for time-critical operations. Thanks to different design features, the system works in real-time and performs mosaicking and change detection tasks at low-altitude, thus allowing the classification even of small objects. The proposed system was tested by using the whole set of challenging video sequences contained in the UAV Mosaicking and Change Detection (UMCD) dataset and other public datasets. The evaluation of the system by well-known performance metrics has shown remarkable results in terms of mosaic creation and updating, as well as in terms of change detection and object detection

Planning UAV Activities for Efficient User Coverage in Disaster Areas

Climate changes brought about by global warming as well as man-made environmental changes are often the cause of sever natural disasters. ICT, which is itself responsible for global warming due to its high carbon footprint, can play a role in alleviating the consequences of such hazards by providing reliable, resilient means of communication during a disaster crisis. In this paper, we explore the provision of wireless coverage through UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to complement, or replace, the traditional communication infrastructure. The use of UAVs is indeed crucial in emergency scenarios, as they allow for the quick and easy deployment of micro and pico cellular base stations where needed. We characterize the movements of UAVs and define an optimization problem to determine the best UAV coverage that maximizes the user throughput, while maintaining fairness across the different parts of the geographical area that has been affected by the disaster. To evaluate our strategy, we simulate a flooding in San Francisco and the car traffic resulting from people seeking safety on higher ground