UAV-Based Situational Awareness System Using Deep Learning

Situational awareness by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is important for many applications such as surveillance, search and rescue, and disaster response. In those applications, detecting and locating people and recognizing their actions in near real-time can play a crucial role for preparing an effective response. However, there are currently three main limitations to perform this task efficiently. First, it is currently often not possible to access the live video feed from a UAV’s camera due to limited bandwidth. Second, even if the video feed is available, monitoring and analyzing video over prolonged time is a tedious task for humans. Third, it is typically not possible to locate random people via their cellphones. Therefore, we developed the Person-Action-Locator (PAL), a novel UAV-based situational awareness system. The PAL system addresses the first issue by analyzing the video feed onboard the UAV, powered by a supercomputer-on-a-module. Specifically, as a support for human operators, the PAL system relies on Deep Learning models to automatically detect people and recognize their actions in near real-time. To address the third issue, we developed a Pixel2GPS converter that estimates the location of people from the video feed. The result – icons representing detected people labeled by their actions – is visualized on the map interface of the PAL system. The Deep Learning models were first tested in the lab and demonstrated promising results. The fully integrated PAL system was successfully tested in the field. We also performed another collection of surveillance data to complement the lab results.