Detecting Flying Objects Using a Single Moving Camera

We propose an approach for detecting flying objects such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and aircrafts when they occupy a small portion of the field of view, possibly moving against complex backgrounds, and are filmed by a camera that itself moves. We argue that solving such a difficult problem requires combining both appearance and motion cues. To this end we propose a regression-based approach for object-centric motion stabilization of image patches that allows us to achieve effective classification on spatio-temporal image cubes and outperform state-of-the-art techniques. As this problem has not yet been extensively studied, no test datasets are publicly available. We therefore built our own, both for UAVs and aircrafts, and will make them publicly available so they can be used to benchmark future flying object detection and collision avoidance algorithms.