A tracking framework for a dynamic non- stationary environment

Sammanfattning: As the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increases in popularity across the globe, their fields of application are constantly growing. This thesis researches the possibility of using a UAV to detect, track, and geolocate a target in a dynamic nonstationary environment as the seas. In this case, different projection and apparent size of the target in the captured images can lead to ambiguous assignments of coordinated. In this thesis, a framework based on a UAV, a monocular camera, a GPS receiver, and the UAV’s inertial measurement unit (IMU) is developed to perform the task of detecting, tracking and geolocating targets. An object detection model called Yolov3 was retrained to be able to detect boats in UAV footage. This model was selected due to its capabilities of detecting targets of small apparent sizes and its performance in terms of speed. A model called the kernelized correlation filter (KCF) is adopted as the visual tracking algorithm. This tracker is selected because of its performance in terms of speed and accuracy. A reinitialization of the tracker in combination with a periodic update of the tracked bounding box are implemented which resulted in improved performance of the tracker. A geolocation method is developed to continuously estimate the GPS coordinates of the target. These estimates will be used by the flight control method already developed by the stakeholder Airpelago to control the UAV. The experimental results show promising results for all models. Due to inaccurate data, the true accuracy of the geolocation method can not be determined. The average error calculated with the inaccurate data is 19.5 meters. However, an in- depth analysis of the results indicates that the true accuracy of the method is more accurate. Hence, it is assumed that the model can estimate the GPS coordinates of a target with an error significantly lower than 19.5 meters. Thus, it is concluded that it is possible to detect, track and geolocate a target in a dynamic nonstationary environment as the seas.