2D visual tracking for sports UAV cinematography applications

In this paper, we provide a preliminary study of basic requirements for autonomous UAV cinematography via 2D target tracking. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we develop a mathematical framework so as to determine hardware camera requirements (specifically, focal length), on a representative case study, i.e., orbiting a still or moving target. Second, we examine the on-board software requirements in order to successfully achieve autonomous target following. To this end, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art realtime 2D visual trackers in videos captured by commercial drones. Overall, it was found that state-of-the-art 2D visual trackers are dependable and fast enough to be used in drone cinematography, particularly when combined with periodic target re-detection. A proposed variant of the Staple tracker achieved the best balance between real-time performance and tracking accuracy, on a dataset composed of 31 sports videos recorded by commercial drones.