There’s nowhere to hide: This drone can track targets through forests

A team of researchers from Austria developed an artificial intelligence-powered drone that can track moving objects through dense foliage. If machines ever rise up against us, we'd have to leave the land.

The research paper was written by the team.

While detecting and tracking moving targets through foliage is difficult (and often even impossible) in regular aerial images or videos, it becomes practically feasible with image integration …

This finding together with the implementation of an initial drone-operated camera array for parallel synthetic aperture aerial imaging allows presenting first results on tracking moving people through dense forest. Besides people, other targets (e.g., vehicles or animals) can be detected and tracked in the same way.

This might impact many application domains, such as search and rescue, surveillance, border control, and wildlife observation.

There are many ways to track moving objects through dense foliage, including FLIR and other thermal optics systems, but there is a new way to track color changes.

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One of the biggest challenges of teaching an artificial intelligence is figuring out what's going on in an image when a lot of relevant information is hidden. In this case, the researchers developed a system capable of using a technique called "color anomaly detection" in real-time to track occluded objects in motion.

The team created a lightweight 1D camera array that captures overhead images of high-foliage areas. Traditional aerial photography techniques use color anomalies to find clusters of images that don't match the environment.

The team's contribution was to develop a hardware and machine learning combination that combined traditional techniques with their new airborne camera system to create something capable of identifying color anomalies and tracking them through occluded areas.

It could have immediate and potentially massive benefits for search and rescue efforts. This solution can be shipped to secluded areas of the world relatively quickly and put into service immediately due to its low compute requirements and power overhead. I can see this saving the lives of hikers who have gone off course or plane crash survivors who are stuck in remote areas.

If used in conjunction with other tracking efforts, it could have a huge upside.

It's clear that something like this could turn a Predator drone into something that can track targets in outlying areas even if it's not connected to the internet or has its communications jammed.