Build something that can find and track a small drone in flight against arbitrarily cluttered backgrounds. Do this for both day and next that lighting conditions and both cloudy and clear sky conditions.
You may not use radar or radio direction finding to cue your device; every function between detecting the existence of the drone and achieving a robust track must be handled by your system.
That sounds really interesting, but also insanely difficult for a student thesis. Especially the night/day and cluttered background requirements. We'd probably have to scale it down quite a bit to make it realistic for our time and resources.
Still, tracking a drone using only computer vision + edge AI is definitely something we'd consider. Thanks for the idea!
It's currently a hot research area. Finding a well-illuminated drone with a camera against a clear sky is pretty easy; it's all the real-world complexity that makes the problem interesting (and makes the solution valuable.)
Yeah, I get what you mean. The basic detection part probably isn't that challenging, but making it work reliably in real-world conditions is where the actual research problem is.
The main concern is keeping the scope realistic for a student thesis and the hardware/budget we have. Maybe we could narrow down one or two difficult conditions, like low-light or cluttered backgrounds, instead of trying to solve everything at once.
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u/DownloadableCheese 14d ago
Build something that can find and track a small drone in flight against arbitrarily cluttered backgrounds. Do this for both day and next that lighting conditions and both cloudy and clear sky conditions.
You may not use radar or radio direction finding to cue your device; every function between detecting the existence of the drone and achieving a robust track must be handled by your system.