Tracking of Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Micro unmanned aerial vehicles (mUAV) became very common in recent years. As a result of their widespread usage, when they are flown by hobbyists illegally, crucial risks are imposed and such mUAVs need to be sensed by security systems. Furthermore, the sensing of mUAVs are essential for also swarm robotics research where the individuals in a flock of robots require systems to sense and localize each other for coordinated operation. In order to obtain such systems, there are studies to detect mUAVs utilizing different sensing mediums, such as vision, infrared and sound signals, and small-scale radars. However, there are still challenges that awaits to be handled in this field such as integrating tracking approaches to the vision-based detection systems to enhance accuracy and computational complexity. For this reason, in this study, we combine various tracking approaches to a vision-based mUAV detection system available in the literature, in order to evaluate different tracking approaches in terms of accuracy and as well as investigate the effect of such integration to the computational cost.