Inverse Airborne Optical Sectioning

TL;DR

This paper introduces Inverse Airborne Optical Sectioning (IAOS), a novel optical technique inspired by radar imaging, enabling the visualization and tracking of heavily occluded moving targets from stationary aerial sensors by synthesizing aperture images.

Contribution

The paper presents the principles of IAOS, a new method for imaging occluded targets, including techniques for signal suppression and automatic motion parameter estimation.

Findings

IAOS enables tracking of occluded targets in aerial images.

Filtering Radon transform enhances target visibility.

Automatic motion estimation improves tracking efficiency.

Abstract

We present Inverse Airborne Optical Sectioning (IAOS) an optical analogy to Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR). Moving targets, such as walking people, that are heavily occluded by vegetation can be made visible and tracked with a stationary optical sensor (e.g., a hovering camera drone above forest). We introduce the principles of IAOS (i.e., inverse synthetic aperture imaging), explain how the signal of occluders can be further suppressed by filtering the Radon transform of the image integral, and present how targets motion parameters can be estimated manually and automatically. Finally, we show that while tracking occluded targets in conventional aerial images is infeasible, it becomes efficiently possible in integral images that result from IAOS.