Visual and IR-Based Target Detection from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In many situations it is important to detect and identify people and vehicles. In this study the purpose was to investigate subject’s performance to detect and estimate number of stationary people on the ground. The unmanned aerial vehicle used visual- and infrared sensor, wide and narrow field of view, and ground speed 8 m/s and 12 m/s. Participants watched synthetic video sequences captured from an unmanned aerial vehicle. The results from this study demonstrated that the ability to detect people was affected by type of sensor and field of view. It took significantly longer time to detect targets with the infrared sensor than with the visual sensor, and it took significantly longer time with wider field of view than with narrow field of view. The ability to assess number of targets was affected by type of sensor and speed, the infrared sensor causing more problems than the visual sensor. Also, performance decreased at higher speed.