Through-Foliage Tracking with Airborne Optical Sectioning
This addresses the challenge of through-foliage tracking for surveillance or search-and-rescue applications, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting and tracking moving targets through dense foliage using a drone-operated 1D camera array for synthetic aperture imaging, achieving an average precision of 97% in color anomaly detection compared to 42% with conventional methods.
Detecting and tracking moving targets through foliage is difficult, and for many cases even impossible in regular aerial images and videos. We present an initial light-weight and drone-operated 1D camera array that supports parallel synthetic aperture aerial imaging. Our main finding is that color anomaly detection benefits significantly from image integration when compared to conventional raw images or video frames (on average 97% vs. 42% in precision in our field experiments). We demonstrate, that these two contributions can lead to the detection and tracking of moving people through densely occluding forest.