Title
Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from Low-Resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Thermal Imagery.
Abstract
Driven by the prominent thermal signature of humans and following the growing availability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more and more research efforts have been focusing on the detection and tracking of pedestrians using thermal infrared images recorded from UAVs. However, pedestrian detection and tracking from the thermal images obtained from UAVs pose many challenges due to the low-resolution of imagery, platform motion, image instability and the relatively small size of the objects. This research tackles these challenges by proposing a pedestrian detection and tracking system. A two-stage blob-based approach is first developed for pedestrian detection. This approach first extracts pedestrian blobs using the regional gradient feature and geometric constraints filtering and then classifies the detected blobs by using a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a hybrid descriptor, which sophisticatedly combines Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) features in order to achieve accurate detection. This research further proposes an approach for pedestrian tracking. This approach employs the feature tracker with the update of detected pedestrian location to track pedestrian objects from the registered videos and extracts the motion trajectory data. The proposed detection and tracking approaches have been evaluated by multiple different datasets, and the results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. This research is expected to significantly benefit many transportation applications, such as the multimodal traffic performance measure, pedestrian behavior study and pedestrian-vehicle crash analysis. Future work will focus on using fused thermal and visual images to further improve the detection efficiency and effectiveness.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.3390/s16040446
SENSORS
Keywords
Field
DocType
pedestrian detection,pedestrian tracking,aerial thermal image,video registration,unmanned aerial vehicle
Histogram,Computer vision,Pedestrian,Discrete cosine transform,Support vector machine,Filter (signal processing),Tracking system,Artificial intelligence,Engineering,Pedestrian detection,Trajectory
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
4.0
1424-8220
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.47
7
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yalong Ma1242.90
Xinkai Wu2294.59
Guizhen Yu34911.52
Yongzheng Xu4241.89
Yunpeng Wang519425.34