The team of the University Mother Teresa – Skopje (UMT) as partner in the Anti-Drone Project participated in the 5th Drone-vs-Bird Detection Challenge. Namely, it is organized within “5th International workshop on small-drone surveillance, detection and counteraction techniques” in conjunction with 21st International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (WOSDETC 2022 @ICIAP). The workshop will be held on 23-27 May in Lecce, Italy. More information of the challenge can be found at the workshop web site https://wosdetc2022.wordpress.com/.
The challenge aims at attracting research efforts to identify novel solutions to the problem outlined above, i.e., discrimination between birds and drones at far distance, by providing a video dataset that may be difficult to obtain (drone flying require special conditions and permissions, and shore areas are needed for the considered problem). The challenge goal is to detect a drone appearing at some time in a short video sequence where birds are also present: the algorithm should raise an alarm and provide a position estimate only when a drone is present, while not issuing alarms on birds.
The test dataset was released on February 21st, 2022 while the challenge submission deadline was March 1st, 2022. The UMT team was amongst the four teams that were able to submit satisfactory results by the deadline and the final ranking appeared as follows:
DroBoost team
DroneNet team
NII team
UMT team
The UMT team as part of the best teams was invited to submit an ICIAP paper describing the approach, which will be published (after peer review) in the conference proceedings and will be also presented in the workshop day session.
