FlyTracker: Motion Tracking and Obstacle Detection for Drones Using Event Cameras

Location awareness in environments is one of the key parts for drones’ applications and have been explored through various visual sensors. However, standard cameras easily suffer from motion blur under high moving speeds and low-quality image under poor illumination, which brings challenges for drones to perform motion tracking. Recently, a kind of bio-inspired sensors called event cameras emerge, offering advantages like high temporal resolution, high dynamic range and low latency, which motivate us to explore their potential to perform motion tracking in limited scenarios. In this paper, we propose FlyTracker, aiming at developing visual sensing ability for drones of both individual and circumambient location-relevant contextual, by using a monocular event camera. In FlyTracker, background-subtraction-based method is proposed to distinguish moving objects from background and fusion-based photometric features are carefully designed to obtain motion information. Through multilevel fusion of events and images, which are heterogeneous visual data, FlyTracker can effectively and reliably track the 6-DoF pose of the drone as well as monitor relative positions of moving obstacles. We evaluate performance of FlyTracker in different environments and the results show that FlyTracker is more accurate than the state-of-the-art baselines.