A Motion Detection Approach based on UAV Image Sequence

Aiming at motion analysis and compensation, it is essential to conduct motion detection with images. However, motion detection and tracking from low-altitude images obtained from an unmanned aerial system may pose many challenges due to degraded image quality caused by platform motion, image instability and illumination fluctuation. This research tackles these challenges by proposing a modified joint transform correlation algorithm which includes two preprocessing strategies. In spatial domain, a modified fuzzy edge detection method is proposed for preprocessing the input images. In frequency domain, to eliminate the disturbance of self-correlation items, the cross-correlation items are extracted from joint power spectrum output plane. The effectiveness and accuracy of the algorithm has been tested and evaluated by both simulation and real datasets in this research. The simulation experiments show that the proposed approach can derive satisfactory peaks of cross-correlation and achieve detection accuracy of displacement vectors with no more than 0.03pixel for image pairs with displacement smaller than 20pixels, when addition of image motion blurring in the range of 0~10pixel and 0.002variance of additive Gaussian noise. Moreover,this paper proposes quantitative analysis approach using tri-image pairs from real datasets and the experimental results show that detection accuracy can be achieved with sub-pixel level even if the sampling frequency can only attain 50 frames per second.