Spatio-Temporal Object Detection from UAV On-Board Cameras

Daniel Cores, Víctor M. Brea, Manuel Mucientes

Abstract: We propose a new two stage spatio-temporal object detector framework able to improve detection precision by taking into account temporal information. First, a short-term proposal linking and aggregation method improves box features. Then, we design a long-term attention module that further enhances short-term aggregated features adding long-term spatio-temporal information. This module takes into account object trajectories to effectively exploit long-term relationships between proposals in arbitrary distant frames. Many videos recorded from UAV on-board cameras have a high density of small objects, making the detection problem very challenging. Our method takes advantage of spatio-temporal information to address these issues increasing the detection robustness. We have compared our method with state-of-the-art video object detectors in two different publicly available datasets focused on UAV recorded videos. Our approach outperforms previous methods in both datasets.