Deep-Learning-Based Aerial Image Classification for Emergency Response Applications Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), equipped with camera sensors can facilitate enhanced situational awareness for many emergency response and disaster management applications since they are capable of operating in remote and difficult to access areas. In addition, by utilizing an embedded platform and deep learning UAVs can autonomously monitor a disaster stricken area, analyze the image in real-time and alert in the presence of various calamities such as collapsed buildings, flood, or fire in order to faster mitigate their effects on the environment and on human population. To this end, this paper focuses on the automated aerial scene classification of disaster events from on-board a UAV. Specifically, a dedicated Aerial Image Database for Emergency Response (AIDER) applications is introduced and a comparative analysis of existing approaches is performed. Through this analysis a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is developed, capable of running efficiently on an embedded platform achieving ~3x higher performance compared to existing models with minimal memory requirements with less than 2% accuracy drop compared to the state-of-the-art. These preliminary results provide a solid basis for further experimentation towards real-time aerial image classification for emergency response applications using UAVs.

DroNet: Efficient convolutional neural network detector for real-time UAV applications

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) are emerging as a promising technology for both environmental and infrastructure monitoring, with broad use in a plethora of applications. Many such applications require the use of computer vision algorithms in order to analyse the information captured from an on-board camera. Such applications include detecting vehicles for emergency response and traffic monitoring. This paper therefore, explores the trade-offs involved in the development of a single-shot object detector based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that can enable UAVs to perform vehicle detection under a resource constrained environment such as in a UAV. The paper presents a holistic approach for designing such systems; the data collection and training stages, the CNN architecture, and the optimizations necessary to efficiently map such a CNN on a lightweight embedded processing platform suitable for deployment on UAVs. Through the analysis we propose a CNN architecture that is capable of detecting vehicles from aerial UAV images and can operate between 5-18 frames-per-second for a variety of platforms with an overall accuracy of ~95%. Overall, the proposed architecture is suitable for UAV applications, utilizing low-power embedded processors that can be deployed on commercial UAVs.