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Integration of the 3D Environment for UAV Onboard Visual Object Tracking

Authors :
Stéphane Vujasinović
Stefan Becker
Timo Breuer
Sebastian Bullinger
Norbert Scherer-Negenborn
Michael Arens
Source :
Applied Sciences, Vol 10, Iss 21, p 7622 (2020)
Publication Year :
2020
Publisher :
MDPI AG, 2020.

Abstract

Single visual object tracking from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) poses fundamental challenges such as object occlusion, small-scale objects, background clutter, and abrupt camera motion. To tackle these difficulties, we propose to integrate the 3D structure of the observed scene into a detection-by-tracking algorithm. We introduce a pipeline that combines a model-free visual object tracker, a sparse 3D reconstruction, and a state estimator. The 3D reconstruction of the scene is computed with an image-based Structure-from-Motion (SfM) component that enables us to leverage a state estimator in the corresponding 3D scene during tracking. By representing the position of the target in 3D space rather than in image space, we stabilize the tracking during ego-motion and improve the handling of occlusions, background clutter, and small-scale objects. We evaluated our approach on prototypical image sequences, captured from a UAV with low-altitude oblique views. For this purpose, we adapted an existing dataset for visual object tracking and reconstructed the observed scene in 3D. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms methods using plain visual cues as well as approaches leveraging image-space-based state estimations. We believe that our approach can be beneficial for trafficmonitoring, video surveillance, and navigation.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
10217622 and 20763417
Volume :
10
Issue :
21
Database :
Directory of Open Access Journals
Journal :
Applied Sciences
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
edsdoj.f9051e12ef541f5b336d2ce882a4765
Document Type :
article
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.3390/app10217622