This paper reports on a novel verification and performance evaluation framework specifically designed and developed to facilitate a standardized comparative performance evaluation for commercial detection, tracking and identification (DTI) solutions to counter Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) threats. The test methodology is designed to compare commercial systems in a fair and reproducible manner based on end-user defined criteria.
DTI systems are increasingly relevant for e.g., perimeter protection of military facilities, critical infrastructures and public events and the expected end-users are law enforcement agencies, the military, civil defense agencies and private entities. However, such systems are commonly hard to benchmark in a fair and comparable manner and performance claims of these systems are currently not supported by evidence. In addition, no standardized test methodologies are currently available making it near impossible to compare competing DTI systems.
In Courageous we developed an objective driven test methodology for use by the civilian sector. Courageous leads to a comparative performance evaluation system for commercial DTI solutions for Counter-UAS systems (C-UASs) using operationally relevant end-user scenarios and a generic DTI system lay-out. The work takes into account contextual information as well as end-user input, albeit focusing primarily on civilian use cases so far. We outline the process taken as well as the resulting system and discuss how the systems should be evaluated and validated iteratively over time. We furthermore elicit end-user input from the defense domain and argue that the scope of Courageous should be broadened to include military challenges, aspects and concerns.
The work with regard to homeland security use-cases, presented here, has firstly been verified in a simulation environment where a number relevant scenarios were used and the output of the simulation injected into the testing system. Validation of the work in a relevant environment has been done in three operational trials.
The results from the operational trials held for homeland security scenarios show that the method allows for performance evaluation at component level (i.e., detection, tracking or identification component) and at system level (combinations of these components and integrated DTI system of system solutions).
Automated object detection is becoming more relevant in a wide variety of applications in the military domain. This includes the detection of drones, ships, and vehicles in video and IR video. In recent years, deep learning based object detection methods, such as YOLO, have shown to be promising in many applications for object detection. However, current methods have limited success when objects of interest are small in number of pixels, e.g. objects far away or small objects closer by. This is important, since accurate small object detection translates to early detection and the earlier an object is detected the more time is available for action. In this study, we investigate novel image analysis techniques that are designed to address some of the challenges of (very) small object detection by taking into account temporal information. We implement six methods, of which three are based on deep learning and use the temporal context of a set of frames within a video. The methods consider neighboring frames when detecting objects, either by stacking them as additional channels or by considering difference maps. We compare these spatio-temporal deep learning methods with YOLO-v8 that only considers single frames and two traditional moving object detection methods. Evaluation is done on a set of videos that encompasses a wide variety of challenges, including various objects, scenes, and acquisition conditions to show real-world performance.
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