Detection, tracking, and geolocation of moving vehicle from UAV using monocular camera

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in urban traffic supervision in recent years. However, the detection, tracking, and geolocation of moving vehicle based on the airborne platform suffer from small object sizes, complex scenes, and low-accuracy sensors. To address these problems, this paper develops a framework for moving vehicle detecting, tracking, and geolocating based on a monocular camera, a GPS receiver, and inertial measurement units (IMUs) sensors. First, the method based on YOLOv3 was employed for vehicle detection due to its effectiveness and efficiency for small object detection in complex scenes. Then, a visual tracking method based on correlation filters is introduced, and a passive geolocation method is presented to calculate the GPS coordinates of the moving vehicle. Finally, a flight control method in terms of the previous image processing results is introduced to lead the UAV that is following the interesting moving vehicle. The proposed scheme has been built on a DJI M100 platform on which a monocular camera and a microcomputer Jetson TX1 are added. The experimental results show that this scheme is capable of detecting, tracking, and geolocating the interesting moving vehicle with high precision. The framework demonstrates its capacity in automatic supervision on target vehicles in real-world experiments, which suggests its potential applications in urban traffic, logistics, and security.