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Tracking moving objects during low altitude flight

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Abstract

A computer-vision system to assist pilots during low-altitude flight has been developed in this research study. During this critical section of flight, a system that can detect various objects on the ground would be very useful both for enhancing the safety of navigation and for relieving pilots of a part of their workload in flight control. Such tasks can generally be automated by computer-vision-based methods, which provide the ability for object detection and tracking. This paper describes the algorithms developed for accomplishing such tasks. There are two main stages in the vision system. First, independently moving objects in the scene are detected and segmented from the background. Then, they are tracked from frame to frame, and their 3D motion parameters are recursively estimated with Kalman filtering techniques. Experiments using real-world image sequences have been carried out, and the results show that tracking moving objects is successful and the estimation of object's motion parameters are quite accurate.

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Tang, YL., Kasturi, R. Tracking moving objects during low altitude flight. Machine Vis. Apps. 9, 20–31 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01246636

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