Drone Detection and Tracking in Real-Time by Fusion of Different Sensing Modalities is a research paper by Fredrik Svanström, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, and Cristofer Englund.

The automatic detection of flying drones is a critical concern, especially when their presence is unauthorized, potentially leading to risky situations or security compromises. This study presents the design and evaluation of a multi-sensor drone detection system. Alongside standard video cameras and microphone sensors, we explore the implementation of thermal infrared cameras, an under-addressed yet promising solution in the existing literature. To enhance coverage, a fish-eye camera is integrated to monitor a wider portion of the sky and direct other cameras toward objects of interest. Our sensing solutions are Comsupplemented with an ADS-B receiver, a GPS receiver, and a radar module. However, the latter was ultimately excluded from our final deployment due to its limited detection range.

The thermal camera demonstrates its feasibility, performing comparably well to the video camera despite its lower resolution. Additionally, our work introduces two notable contributions: creating a new public dataset of multi-sensor annotated data that expands the number of classes compared to existing datasets and investigating detector performance concerning the sensor-to-target distance. Furthermore, we delve into sensor fusion, showcasing how the system’s robustness can be enhanced through this approach, effectively mitigating false detections from individual sensors.

Publication Date- October 2022

Drone Detection and Tracking in Real-Time by Fusion of Different Sensing Modalities contains the following major sections:

  • Introduction
  • Related Work
  • Materials and Methods
  • Results
  • Conclusions

This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Authors- Fredrik Svanström, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, and Cristofer Englund

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Post Image- Tracking of a drone with two different cameras (Image Credit- Authors)