CloudTrack: Scalable UAV Tracking with Cloud Semantics
Published in ICRA, 2025
Recommended citation: Yannik Blei, Michael Krawez, Nisarga Nilavadi, Tanja Katharina Kaiser and Wolfram Burgard. CloudTrack: Scalable UAV Tracking with Cloud Semantics. Accepted to ICRA, Mai 2025 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.16111
Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are commonly used in search and rescue scenarios to gather information in the search area. The automatic identification of the person searched for in aerial footage could increase the autonomy of such systems, reduce the search time, and thus increase the missed person's chances of survival. In this paper, we present a novel approach to perform semantically conditioned open vocabulary object tracking that is specifically designed to cope with the limitations of UAV hardware. Our approach has several advantages. It can run with verbal descriptions of the missing person, e.g., the color of the shirt, it does not require dedicated training to execute the mission and can efficiently track a potentially moving person. Our experimental results demonstrate the versatility and efficacy of our approach. We publish the methods source code at https://github.com/yblei/CloudTrack.