Localising objects with drones: A case study on the localisation of fisher boats in restricted areas
L.Y. Geers (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
M. Meijers (TU Delft - Digital Technologies)
Azarakhsh Rafiee (TU Delft - Digital Technologies)
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Abstract
Due to safety or preservation reasons, certain objects or areas need to be inspected regularly. Currently, the inspection of objects is mostly done in-person, which is labour-intensive and not very effective. With the use of drones, areas and objects can be inspected from new angles at a much faster rate. To effectively monitor these objects with drones, the position and location needs to be extracted from drone data in real time.
In this thesis, a case study is done on the localisation of fisher boats in restricted areas. Several components are integrated to create a prototype. The pretrained YOLOv3 detection model is trained on acquired nadir boat images, which makes it able to predict the bounding boxes of boats on images captured with drones. A positioning algorithm is constructed, which calculates the geographical coordinates from the pixel coordinates for images taken both in a nadir and an oblique angle. A real time connection is constructed between the drone and the prototype. This is done by creating a connection with Google Drive with the drone controller and the prototype. The positioned polygon bounding boxes are localised using a real time dashboard, which visualises the bounding boxes in a map with other relevant layers.
The results indicate that the performance of the components and prototype as a whole are satisfactory for this use case. To deploy this prototype in other object localisation use cases, it is recommended to train the pretrained model further, use a drone with more accurate equipment and run the prototype on the drone controller.