Usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly in a wide range of consumer applications, as they prove to be both autonomous and flexible in a variety of environments and tasks. However, this versatility and ease of use also brings a rapid evolution of threats by malicious actors that can use UAVs for criminal activities, converting them to passive or active threats. The need to protect critical infrastructures and important events from such threats has brought advances in counter UAV (c-UAV) applications. Nowadays, c-UAV applications offer systems that comprise a multi-sensory arsenal often including electro-optical, thermal, acoustic, radar and radio frequency sensors, whose information can be fused to increase the confidence of threat’s identification. Nevertheless, real-time surveillance is a cumbersome process, but it is absolutely essential to detect promptly the occurrence of adverse events or conditions. To that end, many challenging tasks arise such as object detection, classification, multi-object tracking and multi-sensor information fusion. In recent years, researchers have utilized deep learning based methodologies to tackle these tasks for generic objects and made noteworthy progress, yet applying deep learning for UAV detection and classification is considered a novel concept. Therefore, the need to present a complete overview of deep learning technologies applied to c-UAV related tasks on multi-sensor data has emerged. The aim of this paper is to describe deep learning advances on c-UAV related tasks when applied to data originating from many different sensors as well as multi-sensor information fusion. This survey may help in making recommendations and improvements of c-UAV applications for the future.
Counter-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (c-UAV) systems are considered an emerging technology dedicated to address the critical issue of malicious UAV detection. Acquiring useful information from a multitude of data gathered using a topology of different sensors for UAV detection constitutes a problem with substantial importance. In this paper, we present a novel multimodal deep learning methodology to filter and combine data from a variety of unimodal approaches dedicated to UAV detection. Specifically, the aim of this work is to detect, and classify potential UAVs based on a fusion procedure of features from UAV detections provided by unimodal components. Actually, we propose a general fusion neural network framework in order to merge features extracted from unimodal modules and make deductions with increased accuracy. Our method is validated by thorough application to UAV detection and classification tasks. Our model approach achieves significant performance improvement over the unimodal detection results.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become a major part of everyday life, as well as an emerging research field, by establishing their versatility in a variety of applications. Nevertheless, this rapid spread of UAVs reputation has provoked serious security issues that can probably affect homeland security. Defence communities have started to investigate large field-of-view sensor-based methods to enable various civil protection applications, including the detection and localisation of flying threat objects. Counter-UAV (c-UAV) detection challenges may be granted from a fusion of sensors to enhance the confidence of flying threats identification. The real-time monitoring of the environment is absolutely rigorous and demands accurate methods to detect promptly the occurrence of harmful conditions. Deep learning (DL) based techniques are capable of tackling the challenges that are associated with generic objects detection and explicitly UAV identification. In this paper, we present a novel multimodal DL methodology that combines data from individual unimodal approaches that are associated with UAV detection. Specifically, this work aims to identify and classify potential targets of UAVs based on fusion methods in two different cases of operational environments, i.e. rural and urban scenarios. A dedicated architecture is designed based on the development of deep neural networks (DNNs) frameworks that has been trained and validated employing real UAV flights scenarios. The proposed approach has achieved prominent detection accuracies over different background environments, exhibiting potential employment even in major defence applications.
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