Temporal and Non-Temporal Contextual Saliency Analysis for Generalized Wide-Area Search within Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Video

Gökstorp, S.; Breckon, T.P.

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can be used to great effect for wide-area searches such as search and rescue operations. UAV enable search and rescue teams to cover large areas more efficiently and in less time. However, using UAV for this purpose involves the creation of large amounts of data, typically in video format, which must be analysed before any potential findings can be uncovered and actions taken. This is a slow and expensive process which can result in significant delays to the response time after a target is seen by the UAV. To solve this problem we propose a deep model using a visual saliency approach to automatically analyse and detect anomalies in UAV video. Our Temporal Contextual Saliency (TeCS) model is based on the state-ofthe-art in visual saliency detection using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) and considers local and scene context, with novel additions in utilizing temporal information through a convolutional LSTM layer and modifications to the base model. We additionally evaluate the impact of temporal vs nontemporal reasoning for this task. Our model achieves improved results on a benchmark dataset with the addition of temporal reasoning showing significantly improved results compared to the state-of-the-art in saliency detection.

Citation

Gökstorp, S., & Breckon, T. (2022). Temporal and Non-Temporal Contextual Saliency Analysis for Generalized Wide-Area Search within Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Video. Visual Computer, 38(6), 2033-2040. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-021-02264-6

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 14, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Sep 6, 2021
• Publication Date: 2022-06
• Deposit Date: Aug 23, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 18, 2021
• Journal: The Visual Computer
• Print ISSN: 0178-2789
• Electronic ISSN: 1432-2315
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 38
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 2033-2040
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-021-02264-6
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1242382