Automatic target tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle video annotation

Abstract

This paper describes a system for tracking objects in a video stream obtained from a moving airborne platform. The system is applied to annotate video objects automatically. The object to annotate is indicated by a mouse click. The proposed tracking algorithm is based on the general framework of spatiotemporal segmentation followed by temporal tracking. However, it differs from existing techniques in the following features. The same algorithm is used in tracking both moving and stationary objects by making the stationary objects "move." It is general enough to handle objects of various types and sizes, including point objects. The system has a fast implementation because all image operations are applied to small image regions only. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on a few real video sequences.