Visual Feedback Control of Quadrotor by Object Detection in Movies and Object Count Function

Abstract

A target object to be detected in images composing a movie is searched based on the template image prepared in color or shape. After the detection every sampling period of 40 ms, the center of gravity (COG) is calculated, so that visual feedback (VF) control of a quadrotor becomes possible by referring the change of the COG as the relative velocity with respect to the target object. Besides the VF controller, in this research, another useful function to count the number of target objects is considered. This makes it possible to monitor the number of individuals such as cars, animals and other objects contained in frames of a movie. Not only it is difficult for human eyes to conduct high-speed counting of such objects, but also counting errors may occur due to overlapping of target objects. The authors are developing an environmental monitoring system using a quadrotor while solving these problems.