Towards an Integrated Aerial and Ground Surveillance System

Abstract—This paper introduces an integrated surveillance system capable of tracking multiple objects across aerial and ground cameras. To this end, we propose a set of methodologies that deal with tracking problems in urban scenarios where cameras mounted on quad-rotor unmanned helicopters could be used in conjunction with ground cameras to track multiple subjects persistently. We track moving objects from a moving aerial platform using a three staged conventional technique consisting of ego-motion-compensation, blob detection, and blob tracking. A hierarchical robust background subtraction followed by a motion correspondence algorithm is applied to track objects from the ground surveillance camera. Using meta-data available at the airborne camera and the calibration parameters of the ground camera, we are able to transform the object’s position in both cameras ’ local coordinate system to a generic world coordinate system. Trajectories obtained in terms of the generic world coordinate system are then merged assuming temporal continuity. A false candidate trajectory is eliminated using a similarity measure based on color intensity of the object that generated it. Our system has been tested in 3 real-world scenarios where it has been able to merge trajectories successfully in 80 % of the cases. I