Person Recognition in Aerial Surveillance: A Decade Survey
It addresses the problem of person recognition in aerial surveillance for researchers and practitioners by compiling and reviewing existing work, but it is incremental as a survey paper.
This paper provides a comprehensive survey of over 150 papers from the last decade on human-centric aerial surveillance tasks, focusing on detecting, identifying, and re-identifying humans using drones and other airborne platforms, and it analyzes datasets, approaches, and open research gaps.
The rapid emergence of airborne platforms and imaging sensors is enabling new forms of aerial surveillance due to their unprecedented advantages in scale, mobility, deployment, and covert observation capabilities. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of 150+ papers over the last 10 years of human-centric aerial surveillance tasks from a computer vision and machine learning perspective. It aims to provide readers with an in-depth systematic review and technical analysis of the current state of aerial surveillance tasks using drones, UAVs, and other airborne platforms. The object of interest is humans, where human subjects are to be detected, identified, and re-identified. More specifically, for each of these tasks, we first identify unique challenges in performing these tasks in an aerial setting compared to the popular ground-based setting and subsequently compile and analyze aerial datasets publicly available for each task. Most importantly, we delve deep into the approaches in the aerial surveillance literature with a focus on investigating how they presently address aerial challenges and techniques for improvement. We conclude the paper by discussing the gaps and open research questions to inform future research avenues.