Generic Fourier Descriptors for Autonomous UAV Detection

International audience; With increasing number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) -also known as drones- in our lives, safety and privacy concerns have arose. Especially, strategic locations such as governmental buildings, nuclear power stations etc. are under direct threat of these publicly available and easily accessible gadgets. Various methods are proposed as counter-measure, such as acoustics based detection, RF signal interception, micro-doppler RADAR etc. Computer vision based approach for detecting these threats seems as a viable solution due to various advantages. We envision an autonomous drone detection and tracking system for the protection of strategic locations. In this work, 2-dimensional scale, rotation and translation invariant Generic Fourier Descriptor (GFD) features (which are analyzed with a neural network) are used for classifying aerial targets as a drone or bird. For the training of this system, a large dataset composed of birds and drones is gathered from open sources. We have achieved up to 85.3% overall correct classification rate.