A Vision Algorithm for Dynamic Detection of Moving Vehicles with a UAV

This paper presents a vision system for road traffic surveillance from sequences acquired from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This UAV is able to follow a path considered as the surveillance area and defined by a set of ordered GPS points. During the navigation of the UAV, the vision system acquires sequences which are treated in real-time in order to detect vehicles. This detection allows to perform a traffic estimation or to track a pointed out vehicle. The detection of vehicles is based on the spatiotemporal grouping of primitives formulated as a normalized cuts problem. A verification step based on the Dempster-Shafer theory is also proposed in order to recognize the vehicles.