Evaluation of Color Anomaly Detection in Multispectral Images for Synthetic Aperture Sensing

Abstract

In this article, we evaluate unsupervised anomaly detection methods in multispectral images obtained with a wavelength-independent synthetic aperture sensing technique called Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS). With a focus on search and rescue missions that apply drones to locate missing or injured persons in dense forest and require real-time operation, we evaluate the runtime vs. quality of these methods. Furthermore, we show that color anomaly detection methods that normally operate in the visual range always benefit from an additional far infrared (thermal) channel. We also show that, even without additional thermal bands, the choice of color space in the visual range already has an impact on the detection results. Color spaces such as HSV and HLS have the potential to outperform the widely used RGB color space, especially when color anomaly detection is used for forest-like environments.