On-board real-time tracking of pedestrians on a UAV

Recent technical advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) made a realm of applications possible. In this paper we focus on the application of following a walking pedestrian in real-time, using optimised pedestrian detection and object tracking. For this we use an on-board embedded system, offering an optimal ratio of computational power and weight. We extend the commonly used ground plane estimation technique, used to reduce the search space, based on the sensor data off the UAV. The integration of the ground plane constraint obtains a significant speed-up over the already optimised Aggregate Channel Feature (ACF) detector. To compensate for the frames without detections, we use a particle tracker based on color information. We successfully validated our system on a flying UAV.