Real-time detection and recognition of multiple moving objects for aerial surveillance

Detection of moving objects by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an important application in the aerial transportation system. However, there are many problems to be handled such as high-frequency jitter from UAVs, small size objects, low-quality images, computation time reduction, and detection correctness. This paper considers the problem of the detection and recognition of moving objects in a sequence of images captured from a UAV. A new and efficient technique is proposed to achieve the above objective in real time and in real environment. First, the feature points between two successive frames are found for estimating the camera movement to stabilize sequence of images. Then, region of interest (ROI) of the objects are detected as the moving object candidate (foreground). Furthermore, static and dynamic objects are classified based on the most motion vectors that occur in the foreground and background. Based on the experiment results, the proposed method achieves a precision rate of 94 and the computation time of 47.08 frames per second (fps). In comparison to other methods, the performance of the proposed method surpasses those of existing methods. © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.