COCOA: tracking in aerial imagery

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming a core intelligence asset for reconnaissance, surveillance and target tracking in urban and battlefield settings. In order to achieve the goal of automated tracking of objects in UAV videos we have developed a system called COCOA. It processes the video stream through number of stages. At first stage platform motion compensation is performed. Moving object detection is performed to detect the regions of interest from which object contours are extracted by performing a level set based segmentation. Finally blob based tracking is performed for each detected object. Global tracks are generated which are used for higher level processing. COCOA is customizable to different sensor resolutions and is capable of tracking targets as small as 100 pixels. It works seamlessly for both visible and thermal imaging modes. The system is implemented in Matlab and works in a batch mode.