Audio and Video Processing of UAV-Based Signals in the Harmonic Project

Abstract:

The article summarizes selected results of audio and video signal processing in a joint research project on agricultural mission data (HARMONIC) from our previous publications. We compare the results of audio-processing tasks, based on single-channel recordings directly at a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, drone) with the improvements using a lightweight microphone array at the drone, and post-filtering methods. To demonstrate the practical relevance, we survey the speech-recognition performance by simulating human speech commands to a hovering UAV, with limited success due to remaining interference of speech and ego-noise frequencies, also in the improved setup. The video-processing tasks involve the classification of agricultural textures (e.g. different fields, wood areas, or paths, in which we achieve an accuracy of 88.7%) and the detection of typical objects, such as a land machine, animal or person by convolutional neural networks (CNN). Utilizing an image-scaling approach for far-distance objects, the mean average precision in the detection of “small persons” in a large image is improving up to 5...8%, compared to the CNN baseline approach in the reference datasets AgriDrone and VisDrone. Finally, we discuss the potentialities for a combined use of audio and video data, to enable improved methods for human-drone interaction.


Year: 2021
In session: Postersession 1
Pages: 77 to 86