Application of Object Detection and Tracking Techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this research, the information captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are eminently utilized in detecting and tracking moving objects which pose a primary security threat against the United States southern border. Illegal trespassing and border encroachment by immigrants is a huge predicament against the United States border security force and the Department of Homeland Security. It becomes insurmountable to warranty suspicious behaviour, monitoring by human operators for long periods of time, due to the massive amount of data involved. The main objective of this research is to assist the human operators, by implementing intelligent visual surveillance systems which help in detecting and tracking suspicious or unusual events in the video sequence. The visual surveillance system requires fast and robust methods of detecting and tracking moving objects. In this research, we have investigated methods for detecting and tracking objects from UAVs. Moving objects were detected using adaptive background subtraction technique successfully and these detected objects were tracked by using Lucas-Kanade optical flow tracking, Continuously Adaptive Mean-Shift tracking based techniques. The simulation results show the efficacy of these techniques in detecting and tracking moving objects in the video sequences acquired by the UAV.