Adaptive Switching Spatial-Temporal Fusion Detection for Remote Flying Drones

The drone has been applied in various areas due to its small size, high mobility and low price. However, illegal uses of drones have posed huge threats to both public safety and personal privacy. There is an urgent demand for technologies that can timely detect and counter the drones. In this paper, we propose an adaptive switching spatial-temporal fusion detection method for remote flying drones in the airspace using electrical-optical cameras, which can enhance the contrast between the target and background as well as suppressing the noises and clutters simultaneously. For each incoming video frame, a dark-attentive interframe difference method and a row-column separate black-hat method are proposed to generate temporal feature maps (TFM) and spatial feature maps (SFM), respectively, in parallel. Inspired by the phenomenon that the features in TFMs and SFMs both go strong at the regions of the intended target while they do not at other regions where noises and clutters locate, we design an adaptive switching spatial-temporal fusion mechanism to fuse the SFMs and TFMs, generating adaptive switching spatial-temporal feature maps (ASSTFM). Finally, an adaptive local threshold mechanism is used in ASSTFMs to segment the targets from backgrounds. In order to validate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct both offline experiments and field tests. The experiment results manifest that our method is superior to the other seven baseline methods and works more stably for different backgrounds and various types of drones.