This code is a real-time algorithm for Visual Drone Detection and Tracking on the Nvidia Jetson TX2 using YOLOv3 and GOTURN.

Today’s technology is evolving towards autonomous systems and the demand in autonomous drones, cars, robots, etc. has increased drastically in the past years. This project presents a solution for autonomous real-time visual detection and tracking of hostile drones by moving camera equipped on surveillance drones. The algorithm developed in this project, based on state-of-art deep learning and computer vision methods, succeeds at autonomously detecting and tracking a single drone by moving camera and can run at real-time on the Nvidia Jetson TX2. The project can be divided into two main parts: the detection and the tracking. The detection is based on the YOLOv3 (You Only Look Once v3) algorithm and a sliding window method. The tracking is based on the GOTURN (Generic Object Tracking Using Regression Networks) algorithm, which allows to track generic objects at high speed. In order to allow autonomous tracking and enhance the accuracy, a combination of GOTURN and tracking by detection using YOLOv3 was developed. The developed method detects at 18 FPS and tracks at 28 FPS on the Nvidia Jetson TX2.

Keywords: autonomous, drone, detection, tracking, real-time, moving camera, YOLO, GOTURN, Nvidia Jetson TX2

A demo of the code running on the Nvidia Jetson TX2 is available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLVupa1nkZs

Because of the file size, the GOTURN Caffe model wasn't uploaded to the git. Please download the trained model or train the model, then copy "tracke.caffemodel" to the folder: "goturn/nets/".

The goturn pre-trained model can be downloaded using the following link: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/davheld/public/GOTURN/weights_init/tracker_init.caffemodel

If you wish to retrain the model please refer to David Held's repository: https://github.com/davheld/GOTURN

This code has been done thanks to the work available in the following github repositories:

https://github.com/davheld/GOTURN (C++ orginal GOTURN algorithm by David Held)

https://github.com/nrupatunga/PY-GOTURN/ (Python Caffe implementation of David Held's GOTURN)

https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov3 (Python implementation of YOLOv3 by ultralytics)