Deep Learning for UAV-based Object Detection and Tracking: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent deep learning methods for UAV-based object detection and tracking, highlighting challenges, datasets, benchmarks, and future directions to aid researchers in remote sensing and computer vision.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, including datasets, benchmarks, and future research prospects.

Findings

Analyzed existing DL-based methods for UAV object detection and tracking.

Evaluated performance on four benchmark datasets.

Discussed future challenges and research directions.

Abstract

Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.