Panoramic UAV surveillance and recycling system based on structure-free camera array

Abstract

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have rapidly developed, but the illegal use of UAVs by civilians has resulted in disorder and security risks and has increasingly triggered the community concern and worry. Therefore, the monitoring and recycling of UAVs in key regions are of great significance. This paper presents novel panoramic UAV surveillance and autonomous recycling system that is based on the unique structure-free fisheye camera array and has the capability of real-time UAV detection, 3D localization, tracking, and recycling capacity over a very wide field of view. The main characteristics of this paper include the following: 1) constructing a structure-free camera-array-based panoramic UAV surveillance and recycling system; 2) designing a robust dynamic near-infrared laser-source-based self-calibration algorithm for large-scale arbitrary layout of the camera array; and 3) presenting a set of UAV detection, 3D localization, tracking, and autonomous recycling algorithms based on a fish-eye camera array. The system has been tested in various challenging scenarios, including multiple UAVs with significant appearance and scale changes and even poor weather conditions. The extensive experimental results analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, and the analysis of the time performance demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed system. In addition, we successfully conduct a recycling and landing experiment with the Parrot Beobop.