REPUBLIC OF SERBIA

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

www.mod.gov.rs

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

Material Resources Sector

Defensive Technologies Department

Military Technical Institute

www.vti.mod.gov.rs

UAV tracking on fused thermal and color image

RADE PAVLović

Military Technical Institute, Belgrade, rade_pav@yahoo.com

nataša vlahović

Vlatacom Institute, Belgrade, natasa.vlahovic@vlatacom.com

Abstract:Target tracking has always been a popular topic in military, while nowadays it is very important in civil applications also. With the commercial drones (small UAV – Unmaned Aerial Vehicle) being the fastest growing part of the market,the need for usage control has become more important. In this paper possibility of optoelectronics multisensor detection and tracking of UAV is presented. We used three deferent sequences, two from TV and IR sensors and the third is fused sequence which combine images from TV and IR sensor to form a composite image. Using tracking on a fused sequence, we have shown that the results are not much worse than the tracking of individual input sequences. Therefore, it is possible to implement an algorithm in only fused sequence without major losses, while reducing the time required for the fusing algorithm.

Keywords: UAV, target tracking, multi-sensor systems,image fusion, thermal imagery.