Real-Time Aerial Detection and Reasoning on Embedded-UAVs in Rural Environments

We present a unified pipeline architecture for a real-time detection system on an embedded system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Neural architectures have been the industry standard for computer vision. However, most existing works focus solely on concatenating deeper layers to achieve higher accuracy with run-time performance as the tradeoff. This pipeline of networks can exploit the domain-specific knowledge on aerial pedestrian detection and activity recognition for the emerging UAV applications of autonomous surveying and activity reporting. In particular, our pipeline architectures operate in a time-sensitive manner, have high accuracy in detecting pedestrians from various aerial orientations, use a novel attention map for multiactivities recognition, and jointly refine its detection with temporal information. Numerically, we demonstrate our model’s accuracy and fast inference speed on embedded systems. We empirically deployed our prototype hardware with full live feeds in a real-world open field.