AVIATOR: fAst Visual Perception and Analytics for Drone-Based Traffic Operations

Drone-based system is an emerging technology for advanced applications in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). This paper presents our latest developments of a visual perception and analysis system, called AVIATOR, for drone-based road traffic management. The system advances from the previous SeeFar system in several aspects. For visual perception, deep-learning based computer vision models still play the central role but the current system development focuses on fast and efficient detection and tracking performance during real-time image processing. To achieve that, YOLOv7 and ByteTrack models have replaced the previous perception modules to gain better computational performance. Meanwhile, a lane-based traffic steam detection module is added for recognizing detailed traffic flow per lane, enabling more detailed estimation of traffic flow patterns. The traffic analytics module has been modified to estimate traffic states using lane-based data collection. This includes detailed lane-based traffic flow counting as well as traffic density estimation according to vehicle arrival patterns per lane.