Multitarget Real-Time Tracking Algorithm for UAV IoT

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have increased the convenience of urban life. Representing the recent rapid development of drone technology, UAVs have been widely used in fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks and the Internet of Things (IoT), such as drone aerial photography, express drone delivery, and drone traffic supervision. However, owing to low altitude and low speed, drones can only limitedly monitor and detect small target objects, resulting in frequent intrusion and collision. Traditional methods of monitoring the safety of drones are mostly expensive and difficult to implement. In smart city construction, a large number of smart IoT cameras connected to 5G networks are installed in the city. Captured drone images are transmitted to the cloud via a high-speed and low-latency 5G network, and machine learning algorithms are used for target detection and tracking. In this study, we propose a method for real-time tracking of drone targets by using the existing monitoring network to obtain drone images in real time and employing deep learning methods by which drones in urban environments can be guided. To achieve real-time tracking of UAV targets, we employed the tracking-by-detection mode in machine learning, with the network-modified YOLOv3 (you only look once v3) as the target detector and Deep SORT as the target tracking correlation algorithm. We established a drone tracking dataset that contains four types of drones and 2800 pictures in different environments. The tracking model we trained achieved 94.4% tracking accuracy in real-time UAV target tracking and a tracking speed of 54 FPS. These results comprehensively demonstrate that our tracking model achieves high-precision real-time UAV target tracking at a reduced cost.