Detection and tracking of multiple moving vehicles with a UAV

Abstract

Multiple object detection and tracking are essential for video surveillance. A drone or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is very useful for aerial surveillance due to the efficiency of capturing remote scenes. This paper addresses the detection and tracking of moving vehicles with a UAV. A UAV can capture video sequences above the road at a distance. The detection step consists of frame differencing followed by thresholding, morphological filtering, and removing false alarms considering the true size of vehicles. The centroids of the detected areas are considered as measurements for tracking. Tracking is performed with Kalman filtering to estimate the state of the target based on the dynamic state model and measured positions. In the experiment, three moving cars are captured at a long distance by a drone. Experimental results show that the proposed method well detects moving cars and achieves good accuracy in tracking their dynamic state.