Image processing in aerial surveillance and reconnaissance: from pixels to understanding
Judith Dijk, Adam W. M. van Eekeren, Olga Rajadell Rojas, Gertjan J. Burghouts, Klamer Schutte · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2013
Surveillance and reconnaissance tasks are currently often performed using an airborne platform such as a UAV. The airborne platform can carry different sensors. EO/IR cameras can be used to view a certain area from above. To support the task from the sensor analyst, different image processing techniques can be applied on the data, both in real-time or for forensic applications. These algorithms aim at improving the data acquired to be able to detect objects or events and make an interpretation of those detections. There is a wide range of techniques that tackle these challenges and we group them in classes according to the goal they pursue (image enhancement, modeling the world object information, situation assessment). An overview of these different techniques and different concepts of operations for these techniques are presented in this paper.