FPGA-based real-time moving target detection system for unmanned aerial vehicle application

Moving target detection is the most common task for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to find and track object of interest from a bird's eye view in mobile aerial surveillance for civilian applications such as search and rescue operation. The complex detection algorithm can be implemented in a real-time embedded system using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This paper presents the development of real-time moving target detection System-on-Chip (SoC) using FPGA for deployment on a UAV. The detection algorithm utilizes area-based image registration technique which includes motion estimation and object segmentation processes. The moving target detection system has been prototyped on a low-cost Terasic DE2-115 board mounted with TRDB-D5M camera. The system consists of Nios II processor and stream-oriented dedicated hardware accelerators running at 100 MHz clock rate, achieving 30-frame per second processing speed for 640 × 480 pixels' resolution greyscale videos

Constitutional Shapeshifting: Giving the Fourth Amendment Substance in the Technology Driven World of Criminal Investigation

For the first hundred years of the Fourth Amendment\u27s life, gains in the technology of surveillance were modest. With the advent of miniaturization and ever-increasing sophistication and capability of surveillance and detection devices, the Supreme Court has struggled to adapt its understanding of search to the constantly evolving devices and methods that challenge contemporary understanding of privacy. In response to surveillance innovations, the Court has taken varying positions, focusing first on property-based intrusions by government, then shifting to privacy expectations, and, more recently, resurrecting the view that a trespass to property can define search. This article surveys this constitutional odyssey, noting the inadequacies of each phase\u27s approach. It then suggests a reconceptualization of search doctrine better designed to align constitutional protection with the moving target of investigative techniques. The view of privacy, central to the Fourth Amendment, is recast as a broader, and more representative, normative component rather than a simple risk-assessment. Investigative motive or intent, which only intermittently has played a part in the definition of search, is proposed as a constant factor within search analysis. And trespass doctrine, only recently back from the dead, is broadened and refocused to emphasize invasiveness more generally. With candid recognition of the weaknesses and difficulties inherent in all of these modes of analysis, the article makes the case for taking up the hard job of conforming the language, tradition, and popular expectations of constitutional protection to the realities of an ever-changing surveillance landscape

Monitoring, Creeping, or Surveillance? A Synthesis of Online Social Information Seeking Concepts

Affordances of Internet sites and Internet-based applications make personal information about romantic partners, friends, family members, and strangers easy to obtain. People use various techniques to find information about others, capitalizing on online affordances by using search engines to find relevant websites and databases; scouring the target’s social media or social networking site presence; accessing information about the target via their links or network association with others on social media; or asking questions or crowdsourcing information through online channels. Researchers have coined an assortment of terms to describe online social information seeking behaviors, such as interpersonal electronic surveillance, social surveillance, monitoring, patient-targeted Googling, cybervetting, websleuthing, human flesh search, lateral surveillance, Facebook surveillance, and Facebook stalking. Although considerable research has examined these behaviors, there has been little effort to clarify the concepts themselves. As a result, the literature is currently full of inconsistent and overlapping conceptualizations. To synthesize these concepts for future research, this review examines 73 online social information seeking concepts extracted from 186 articles. Specifically, the concepts are reviewed in light of their scope; the information seeker or target of information seeking (e.g., romantic partners, parents, children, employees, criminals); motives for information seeking (e.g., uncertainty, threat, curiosity); and the intensity of the behavior. Recommendations are provided for future research, such as employing clear conceptualizations and incorporating affordances. Finally, we offer a decision tree that researchers can use to help select appropriate terms to use in their work moving forward

Multimission Aircraft Design Study-Operational Scenarios

In the most recent years, the Command, Control and Communications, Counter Measures, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C3CMISR) aircrafts are used commonly in many NATO and UN Operations around the world. These aircrafts are AWACS, JSTARS, Rivet Joint, Compass Call and ABCCC. They provide close air support in the name of airborne surveillance, ground moving target surveillance, target reconnaissance, jamming, and command, control and communications issues in operational environments. Those aircrafts are tasked with a wide variety of missions than ever before in operational theaters and each one of them comprises a specific amount of cost and risk factors. As a new vision, while replacing the existing legacy systems, multi-mission architectures are taken into consideration for the C3CMISR missions. The stated objective is designing a one tail number Multi-Mission Aircraft (MMA) that includes all the C3CMISR tasks on one airframe. This study seeks some comments and advises about the MMA design technical feasibility. In order to search for these comments, four notional operational scenarios are created. First of all existing C3CMISR aircrafts are considered and evaluated in these operational scenarios and then different MMA architectures are defined and compared with the legacy systems in the name of adequacy

Face search in CCTV surveillance

BACKGROUND: We present a series of experiments on visual search in a highly complex environment, security closed-circuit television (CCTV). Using real surveillance footage from a large city transport hub, we ask viewers to search for target individuals. Search targets are presented in a number of ways, using naturally occurring images including their passports and photo ID, social media and custody images/videos. Our aim is to establish general principles for search efficiency within this realistic context. RESULTS: Across four studies we find that providing multiple photos of the search target consistently improves performance. Three different photos of the target, taken at different times, give substantial performance improvements by comparison to a single target. By contrast, providing targets in moving videos or with biographical context does not lead to improvements in search accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: We discuss the multiple-image advantage in relation to a growing understanding of the importance of within-person variability in face recognition

Convolutional neural network-based real-time object detection and tracking for parrot AR drone 2.

Recent advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have provided an opportunity to create autonomous devices, robots, and machines characterized particularly with the ability to make decisions and perform tasks without human mediation. One of these devices, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are widely used to perform tasks like surveillance, search and rescue, object detection and target tracking, parcel delivery (recently started by Amazon), and many more. The sensitivity in performing said tasks demands that drones must be efficient and reliable. For this, in this paper, an approach to detect and track the target object, moving or still, for a drone is presented. The Parrot AR Drone 2 is used for this application. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used for object detection and target tracking. The object detection results show that CNN detects and classifies object with a high level of accuracy (98%). For real-time tracking, the tracking algorithm responds faster than conventionally used approaches, efficiently tracking the detected object without losing it from sight. The calculations based on several iterations exhibit that the efficiency achieved for target tracking is 96.5%

Coordinated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Surveillance of Targets

PhDThis thesis investigates the coordination approaches of multiple mobile and autonomous robots, especially resource-limited small-scale UAVs, for the surveillance of pre-de ned ground targets in a given environment. A key research issue in surveillance task is the coordination among the robots to determine the target's time varying locations. The research focuses on two applications of surveillance: (i) cooperative search of stationary targets, and (ii) cooperative observation of moving targets. The objective in cooperative search is to minimize the time and errors in nding the locations of stationary targets. The objective of cooperative observation is to maximize the collective time and quality of observation of moving targets. The thesis presents a survey of the approaches in a larger domain of multi-robot systems for the surveillance of pre-de ned targets in a given environment. This survey identi es various factors and application scenarios that a ect the performance of multi-robot surveillance systems. The thesis proposes a distributed strategy for merging delayed and incomplete information, which is a result of sensing and communication limitations, collected by di erent UAVs. An analytic derivation of the number of required observations is provided to declare the absence or existence of a target in a region. This number of required observations is integrated into an iterative use of Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Multiple Travelling Salesmen Problem (MTSP) for autonomous path planning of UAVs. Additionally, it performs an exploration of the algorithmic design space and analyzes the e ects of centralized and distributed coordination on the cooperative search of stationary targets in the presence of sensing and communication limitations. The thesis also proposes the application of UAVs for observing multiple moving targets with di erent resolutions. A key contribution is to use the quad-tree data-structure for modelling the environment and movement of UAVs. This modelling has helped in the dynamic sensor placement of UAVs to maximize the observation of the number of moving targets as well as the resolution of observation.European Regional Development Fund and the Carinthian Economic Promotion Fund (KWF) under grant 20214/21530/32602