Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in environmental biology: A Review

Acquiring information about the environment is a key step during each study in the field of environmental biology at different levels, from an individual species to community and biome. However, obtaining information about the environment is frequently difficult because of, for example, the phenological timing, spatial distribution of a species or limited accessibility of a particular area for the field survey. Moreover, remote sensing technology, which enables the observation of the Earth’s surface and is currently very common in environmental research, has many limitations such as insufficient spatial, spectral and temporal resolution and a high cost of data acquisition. Since the 1990s, researchers have been exploring the potential of different types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for monitoring Earth’s surface. The present study reviews recent scientific literature dealing with the use of UAV in environmental biology. Amongst numerous papers, short communications and conference abstracts, we selected 110 original studies of how UAVs can be used in environmental biology and which organisms can be studied in this manner. Most of these studies concerned the use of UAV to measure the vegetation parameters such as crown height, volume, number of individuals (14 studies) and quantification of the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation changes (12 studies). UAVs were also frequently applied to count birds and mammals, especially those living in the water. Generally, the analytical part of the present study was divided into following sections: (1) detecting, assessing and predicting threats on vegetation, (2) measuring the biophysical parameters of vegetation, (3) quantifying the dynamics of changes in plants and habitats and (4) population and behaviour studies of animals. At the end, we also synthesised all the information showing, amongst others, the advances in environmental biology because of UAV application. Considering that 33% of studies found and included in this review were published in 2017 and 2018, it is expected that the number and variety of applications of UAVs in environmental biology will increase in the future

Advanced framework for microscopic and lane‐level macroscopic traffic parameters estimation from UAV video

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166282/1/itr2bf00873.pd

Crowd detection and counting using a static and dynamic platform: state of the art

Automated object detection and crowd density estimation are popular and important area in visual surveillance research. The last decades witnessed many significant research in this field however, it is still a challenging problem for automatic visual surveillance. The ever increase in research of the field of crowd dynamics and crowd motion necessitates a detailed and updated survey of different techniques and trends in this field. This paper presents a survey on crowd detection and crowd density estimation from moving platform and surveys the different methods employed for this purpose. This review category and delineates several detections and counting estimation methods that have been applied for the examination of scenes from static and moving platforms

CAROM Air -- Vehicle Localization and Traffic Scene Reconstruction from Aerial Videos

Road traffic scene reconstruction from videos has been desirable by road safety regulators, city planners, researchers, and autonomous driving technology developers. However, it is expensive and unnecessary to cover every mile of the road with cameras mounted on the road infrastructure. This paper presents a method that can process aerial videos to vehicle trajectory data so that a traffic scene can be automatically reconstructed and accurately re-simulated using computers. On average, the vehicle localization error is about 0.1 m to 0.3 m using a consumer-grade drone flying at 120 meters. This project also compiles a dataset of 50 reconstructed road traffic scenes from about 100 hours of aerial videos to enable various downstream traffic analysis applications and facilitate further road traffic related research. The dataset is available at https://github.com/duolu/CAROM.Comment: Accepted to IEEE ICRA 202

Aerial Vehicle Tracking by Adaptive Fusion of Hyperspectral Likelihood Maps

Hyperspectral cameras can provide unique spectral signatures for consistently distinguishing materials that can be used to solve surveillance tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time hyperspectral likelihood maps-aided tracking method (HLT) inspired by an adaptive hyperspectral sensor. A moving object tracking system generally consists of registration, object detection, and tracking modules. We focus on the target detection part and remove the necessity to build any offline classifiers and tune a large amount of hyperparameters, instead learning a generative target model in an online manner for hyperspectral channels ranging from visible to infrared wavelengths. The key idea is that, our adaptive fusion method can combine likelihood maps from multiple bands of hyperspectral imagery into one single more distinctive representation increasing the margin between mean value of foreground and background pixels in the fused map. Experimental results show that the HLT not only outperforms all established fusion methods but is on par with the current state-of-the-art hyperspectral target tracking frameworks.Comment: Accepted at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 201

Machine Learning based Vehicle Counting and Detection System

The study of how machines perceive instead of humans is known as vehicle detection or computer vision object identification. The primary purpose of a vehicle detection system is to identify one or multiple vehicles within the input images and live video feed. The dataset is used to train image processing algorithms for tasks like detection and tracking. To pinpoint the defects and strength of each image processing system, assessment criteria are used to develop, train, test, and compare them. To recognize, track, and count the vehicle in images and videos, the image processing algorithms such as CNN YOLOv3 and SVM are implemented. The main goal and intention of this work is to develop a system that can intelligently identify and track automobiles in still images and moving movies. The results demonstrated that CNN-based YOLOv3 does a  good job of detecting and tracking vehicles.   &nbsp