Semantic regions segmentation using a spatio-temporal model from an UAV image sequence with an optimal configuration for data acquisition

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are used to conduct a variety of recognition as well as specific missions such as target tracking and safe landing. The transmitted image sequences to be interpreted at ground station usually face limited requirements of the data transmission. In this paper, on the one hand, we handle a surveillance mission with segmenting an UAV video's content into semantic regions. A multi-class image segmentation approach is proposed considering UAV video-specific characteristics. After post-processing steps on the segmentation results, a support vector-machine classifier is used to recognize regions. A Markov model is introduced to combine the results from the previous frames in order to improve the accuracy. On the other hand, this study also assesses the influences of data reduction techniques on the proposed techniques. The comparisons between the untreated configuration and control conditions under manipulations of the frame rate, spatial resolution, and compression ratio, demonstrate how these data reduction techniques adversely influence the algorithm's performance. The experiments also point out the optimal configuration in order to obtain a trade-off between the target performance and requirements of the data transmission.

Keywords

• Image segmentation
• UAV image modality
• Markov chain
• bit rate
• image compression
• data transmission