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Efficient detection and tracking of moving objects in geo-coordinates

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Abstract

We present a system to detect and track moving objects from an airborne platform. Given a global map, such as a satellite image, our approach can locate and track the targets in geo-coordinates, namely longitude and latitude obtained from geo-registration. A motion model in geo-coordinates is more physically meaningful than the one in image coordinates. We propose to use a two-step geo-registration approach to stitch images acquired by satellite and UAV cameras. Mutual information is used to find correspondences between these two very different modalities. After motion segmentation and geo-registration, tracking is performed in a hierarchical manner: at the temporally local level, moving image blobs extracted by motion segmentation are associated into tracklets; at the global level, tracklets are linked by their appearance and spatio-temporal consistency on the global map. To achieve efficient time performance, graphics processing unit techniques are applied in the geo-registration and motion detection modules, which are the bottleneck of the whole system. Experiments show that our method can efficiently deal with long term occlusion and segmented tracks even when targets fall out the field of view.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, University of Southern California, 3737 Watt Way, PHE 101, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Yuping Lin, Qian Yu & Gérard Medioni

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  1. Yuping Lin
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  2. Qian Yu
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  3. Gérard Medioni
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Correspondence to Yuping Lin.

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Lin, Y., Yu, Q. & Medioni, G. Efficient detection and tracking of moving objects in geo-coordinates. Machine Vision and Applications 22, 505–520 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-010-0264-1

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