Marine Object Detection in UAV Full-Motion Video

Recent years have seen an increased use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with video-recording capability for Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) and other surveillance operations. In order for these efforts to be effective, there is a need to develop automated algorithms to process the full-motion videos (FMV) captured by UAVs in an efficient and timely manner to extract meaningful information that can assist human analysts and decision makers. This paper presents a generalizeable marine object detection system that is specifically designed to process raw video footage streaming from UAVs in real-time. Our approach does not make any assumptions about the object and/or background characteristics because, in the MDA domain, we encounter varying background and foreground characteristics such as boats, bouys and ships of varying sizes and shapes, wakes, white caps on water, glint from the sun, to name but a few. Our efforts rely on basic signal processing and machine learning approaches to develop a generic object detection system that maintains a high level of performance without making prior assumptions about foreground-background characteristics and does not experience abrupt performance degradation when subjected to variations in lighting, background characteristics, video quality, abrupt changes in video perspective, size, appearance and number of the targets. In the following report, in addition to our marine object detection system, we present representative object detection results on some real-world UAV full-motion video data.