Salient object detection approach in UAV video

The automatic detection of visually salient information from abundant video imagery is crucial, as it plays an important role in surveillance and reconnaissance tasks for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). A real-time approach for the detection of salient objects on road, e.g. stationary and moving vehicle or people, is proposed, which is based on region segmentation and saliency detection within related domains. Generally, the traditional method specifically depends upon additional scene information and auxiliary thermal or IR sensing for secondary confirmation. However, this proposed approach can detect the interesting objects directly from video imagery captured by optical camera fixed on the small level UAV platform. To validate this proposed salient object detection approach, the 25 Hz video data from our low speed small UAV are tested. The results have demonstrated the proposed approach performs excellently in isolated rural environments.