Through-Foliage Tracking with Airborne Optical Sectioning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a drone-operated 1D camera array for through-foliage tracking, demonstrating that image integration significantly improves color anomaly detection, enabling tracking of moving people in dense forests.

Contribution

The paper presents a lightweight, drone-mounted 1D camera array supporting synthetic aperture imaging and shows that image integration enhances detection accuracy over raw images.

Findings

Color anomaly detection precision improved to 97% with image integration.

Detection and tracking of moving people through dense foliage achieved.

Synthetic aperture imaging enables through-foliage tracking in real-world scenarios.

Abstract

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.