Visual Tracking of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Object Proposal Voting

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel visual tracking method for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in aerial scenery. To track the UAVs robustly, we present a new object proposal method that can accurately determine the object regions that are likely to exist. The proposed object proposal method is robust to small objects and severe background clutter. For this, we vote on candidate areas of the object and increase or decrease the weight of the area accordingly. Thus, the method can accurately propose the object areas that can be used to track small-sized UAVs with the assumption that their motion is smooth over time. Experimental results verify that UAVs are accurately tracked even when they are very small and the background is complex. The proposed method qualitatively and quantitatively delivers state-of-the-art performance in comparison with conventional object proposal-based methods.