Continuous Marine Tracking via Autonomous UAV Handoff

TL;DR

This paper presents an autonomous UAV system for continuous marine animal tracking, featuring a novel inter-UAV handoff protocol that enhances coverage and robustness in challenging marine environments.

Contribution

It introduces a seamless UAV handoff framework and demonstrates its effectiveness for extended, real-time marine animal tracking in dynamic conditions.

Findings

Achieved 81.9% tracking success rate on a shark dataset.

Handoff protocol reached 82.9% target coverage.

System proved robust to occlusion and lighting changes.

Abstract

This paper introduces an autonomous UAV vision system for continuous, real-time tracking of marine animals, specifically sharks, in dynamic marine environments. The system integrates an onboard computer with a stabilised RGB-D camera and a custom-trained OSTrack pipeline, enabling visual identification under challenging lighting, occlusion, and sea-state conditions. A key innovation is the inter-UAV handoff protocol, which enables seamless transfer of tracking responsibilities between drones, extending operational coverage beyond single-drone battery limitations. Performance is evaluated on a curated shark dataset of 5,200 frames, achieving a tracking success rate of 81.9\% during real-time flight control at 100 Hz, and robustness to occlusion, illumination variation, and background clutter. We present a seamless UAV handoff framework, where target transfer is attempted via high-confidence feature matching, achieving 82.9\% target coverage. These results confirm the viability of coordinated UAV operations for extended marine tracking and lay the groundwork for scalable, autonomous monitoring.