A New Method for Surface-to-Air Video Detection and Tracking of Airborne Vehicles

Detection process of airborne targets may be thought simple because of the incompatible nature of aircraft, choppers, UAVs, and drones regarding clear sky background. When changes in the background are considered, brightness variation of the sky complicates the process. Changes in the shapes and types of clouds add another challenge to the process. Tracking process directly depends on the detection process and type of the data stream. The practical systems used for video detection and tracking of airborne targets are manual, and manual structures have some drawbacks compared to automatic structures. For video surveillance, guidance, regional security, and defense applications in dense environments, automatic detection and tracking process may be an obligation rather than preference. In this study, an automatic detection and tracking algorithm for video streams of airborne targets is proposed. A land-based moving camera captures the video data, and not only the flying objects but probably also the camera are in motion. Although the detection and tracking of moving objects via moving sensors is a relatively arduous task, this is the prevalent case in real-life scenarios. Video detection and tracking systems have one or more moving video sensors, while one or more flying air vehicles are in operation area. The proposed algorithm includes an image processing stage for detection and a tracking stage for initiation and continuation. An assessment study has been conducted for the actual video data and found that the proposed method yields successful results for detection, track formation, and continuation processes.