20,655 research outputs found
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
Joint-SRVDNet: Joint Super Resolution and Vehicle Detection Network
In many domestic and military applications, aerial vehicle detection and
super-resolutionalgorithms are frequently developed and applied independently.
However, aerial vehicle detection on super-resolved images remains a
challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in the
super-resolved images. To address this problem, we propose a Joint
Super-Resolution and Vehicle DetectionNetwork (Joint-SRVDNet) that tries to
generate discriminative, high-resolution images of vehicles fromlow-resolution
aerial images. First, aerial images are up-scaled by a factor of 4x using a
Multi-scaleGenerative Adversarial Network (MsGAN), which has multiple
intermediate outputs with increasingresolutions. Second, a detector is trained
on super-resolved images that are upscaled by factor 4x usingMsGAN architecture
and finally, the detection loss is minimized jointly with the super-resolution
loss toencourage the target detector to be sensitive to the subsequent
super-resolution training. The network jointlylearns hierarchical and
discriminative features of targets and produces optimal super-resolution
results. Weperform both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our proposed
network on VEDAI, xView and DOTAdatasets. The experimental results show that
our proposed framework achieves better visual quality than thestate-of-the-art
methods for aerial super-resolution with 4x up-scaling factor and improves the
accuracy ofaerial vehicle detection
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
LR-CNN: Local-aware Region CNN for Vehicle Detection in Aerial Imagery
State-of-the-art object detection approaches such as Fast/Faster R-CNN, SSD,
or YOLO have difficulties detecting dense, small targets with arbitrary
orientation in large aerial images. The main reason is that using interpolation
to align RoI features can result in a lack of accuracy or even loss of location
information. We present the Local-aware Region Convolutional Neural Network
(LR-CNN), a novel two-stage approach for vehicle detection in aerial imagery.
We enhance translation invariance to detect dense vehicles and address the
boundary quantization issue amongst dense vehicles by aggregating the
high-precision RoIs' features. Moreover, we resample high-level semantic pooled
features, making them regain location information from the features of a
shallower convolutional block. This strengthens the local feature invariance
for the resampled features and enables detecting vehicles in an arbitrary
orientation. The local feature invariance enhances the learning ability of the
focal loss function, and the focal loss further helps to focus on the hard
examples. Taken together, our method better addresses the challenges of aerial
imagery. We evaluate our approach on several challenging datasets (VEDAI,
DOTA), demonstrating a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
We demonstrate the good generalization ability of our approach on the DLR 3K
dataset.Comment: 8 page
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
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