Drone

MASTER THESIS
Drone Detection and Classification using Machine

Learning and Sensor Fusion
Fredrik Svanström
Halmstad University, June 3, 2020

supervisors:
PhD Cristofer Englund
PhD Fernando Alonso-Fernandez
PhD Eren Erdal Aksoy
examiner:
Professor Slawomir Nowaczyk
Fredrik Svanström: Drone Detection and Classification using Machine

Learning and Sensor Fusion,
c
ABSTRACT
This thesis explores the process of designing an automatic multi-

sensor drone detection system using machine learning and sensor
fusion. Besides the more common video and audio sensors, the sys-
tem also includes a thermal infrared camera. The results show that
utilizing an infrared sensor is a feasible solution to the drone detec-
tion task, and even with slightly lower resolution, the performance is
just as good as a video sensor. The detector performance as a function
of the sensor-to-target distance is also investigated.
Using sensor fusion, the system is made more robust than the in-
dividual sensors. It is observed that when using the proposed sensor
fusion approach, the output system results are more stable, and the
number of false detections is mitigated.
A video dataset containing 650 annotated infrared and visible videos

of drones, birds, airplanes and helicopters is published. Addition-
ally, an audio dataset with the classes drones, helicopters and back-
grounds is also published.
iii
CONTENTS
1 introduction 1
1.1 Related work 2
1.1.1 Thermal infrared sensors 3
1.1.2 Sensors in the visible range 4
1.1.3 Acoustic sensors 6
1.1.4 RADAR 6
1.1.5 Other drone detection techniques 7
1.1.6 Sensor fusion 7
1.1.7 Drone detection datasets 8
1.2 Thesis scope 9
1.2.1 Thesis system specifications and limitations 9
2 methods and materials 11
2.1 Proposed methodology 12
2.2 System architecture 13
2.3 Hardware 16
2.3.1 Thermal infrared camera 17
2.3.2 Video camera 18
2.3.3 Fisheye lens camera 18
2.3.4 Microphone 18
2.3.5 RADAR module 18
2.3.6 ADS-B receiver 19
2.3.7 GPS receiver 20
2.3.8 Pan/tilt platform including servo controller 20
2.3.9 Laptop 21
2.4 Software 21
2.4.1 System software 22
2.4.2 Support software 35
2.5 Graphical user interface 36
2.6 Dataset for training and evaluation 41
3 results 47
3.1 Performance of the individual sensors 47
3.1.1 Thermal infrared detector and classifier 48
3.1.2 Video detector and classifier 53
3.1.3 Fisheye lens camera motion detector 60
3.1.4 Acoustic classifier 63
3.1.5 RADAR module 65
3.2 Sensor fusion and system performance 67
3.3 Drone detection dataset 81
4 discussion 85
5 conclusions 89
bibliography 91
v
INTRODUCTION
1
Small and remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), here-
inafter referred to as drones, can be useful and of benefit for society.
Examples of their usefulness are to deliver automated external defib-
rillators [1], to more effectively fight fires [2] and for law enforcement
purposes. Moreover, the low cost and ease of operation make drones
suitable for entertainment and amusement purposes [3].
Nevertheless, such drones can also be intentionally or unintention-

ally misused, so that the safety and security of others are affected or
threatened. In the worse case, this can cause severe structural dam-
age to an aircraft if it collides mid-air with a consumer-sized drone
even when flying at moderate speeds as shown by researchers at the
University of Dayton [4].
Due to the rapid development of commercial and recreational drones

the research area of drone detection and classification has emerged in
the last few years [5] and, as can be seen in Figure 1 below, the Inter-
net search trend for web pages with drone detection related content
has been increasing over the last ten years.
Figure 1: Search trend for "drone detection" over the last ten years. From [6].
This thesis will explore the possibilities and limitations of design-

ing and constructing a multi-sensor drone detection and classifica-
tion system building on state-of-the-art machine learning methods
and techniques. This will also include the collection and annotation
of the necessary dataset to accomplish the training and evaluation of
the system. Three different consumer-grade drones1 are included in
the dataset together with birds, airplanes and helicopters.
1 Hubsan H107D+, DJI Phantom 4 Pro and DJI Flame Wheel F450
1
2 introduction
1.1 related work
To automatically detect flying drones, some form of sensor or sensor

system is needed. As shown in [7], the fusion of data from multiple
sensors, i.e. using several sensors in combination to achieve more ac-
curate results than derived from single sensors, while compensating
for their individual weaknesses, is well-founded when it comes to the
drone detection task.
The sensors that may be considered for drone detection and clas-
sification tasks, and hence can be found in the related scientific lit-
erature, are: RADAR (on several different frequency bands and both
active and passive), cameras for the visible spectrum, cameras detect-
ing thermal infrared emission (IR), microphones for the detection of
acoustic vibrations, i.e. sound, sensors to detect radio frequency sig-
nals to and from the drone and the drone controller (RF), Scanning
lasers (Lidar) and, as mentioned in [7] and explored further in [8],
even humans. Recently it has also been successfully demonstrated
that animals can be trained to fulfil an anti-drone role [9].
Systems for drone detection utilizing one or more of the aforemen-

tioned sensors may also be combined with some form of effector to
try to bring the flying drone down or, in some other way, take control
of it. An effector component, however, is not part of this thesis work.
An introduction to the subject of drone detection is found in [10],

published in 2018. It incorporates a comparison of advantages and
disadvantages for different drone detection and tracking techniques.
Regarding sensor fusion, the authors state that "For accurate and quick
detection/tracking of UAVs, data fusion techniques that can simultaneously
use information from multiple types of sensors carry critical importance, and
this constitutes an open research area".
One of the conclusions of [10] is also that "Future research directions

include developing effective machine learning methods for detecting, clas-
sifying, and tracking drones in various scenarios of interest". The paper
also briefly provides an overview of ways to interdict unauthorized
drones.
According to the authors, [5] "presents a comprehensive review of cur-

rent literature on drone detection and classification using machine learning
with different modalities". This paper, published in 2019, also summa-
rizes the results of the related work found in the 50 references into
several tables, based on the type of sensor, to better describe the spec-
ifications and limitations of the different techniques.
1.1 related work 3
One of the take-home messages is that the authors, on more than

one occasion, stresses the current lack of publicly available reference
datasets. Furthermore, they also write that "No study was presented
which investigated the classification performance as a function of drone dis-
tance not to speak of determining the range using regression models. This
can be a very interesting research area in the future", and that "Most of
the research in visual drone detection fails to specify the type of the acquisi-
tion device, the drone type, the detection range, and the dataset used in their
research. These details are key to validate the work and make it comparable
with related literature".
A weakness of [5] is that it does not include any papers that make
use of thermal infrared cameras and, as we will see next, this is some-
thing that will be of importance to this thesis.
Also published in 2019, [7] has an exhaustive 178 references. Within

these are not only articles specific to drone detection and classifica-
tion, but also literature regarding the general techniques employed,
e.g. useful aspects of sensor fusion and machine learning.
This paper is directly reflected in the further extent of the thesis

work with conclusions such as "For the case of thermal cameras, we
present deep learning based methods for general object detection and clas-
sification because, to the best of authors’ knowledge, there is currently no
work tackling the UAV detection and classification problem", and "Deep
learning based object detection and classification architectures have been suc-
cessfully utilized on thermal imagery for generic targets yet not for UAVs.
This could be the motivation for researchers to turn their attention to this
novel subject".
1.1.1 Thermal infrared sensors
The work described in [11], from 2017, does not utilize any form of
machine learning but instead the drone detection and classification is
done by a human in real-time looking at the output video stream.
The sensor used is a low-cost FLIR Lepton 80x60 pixels thermal

camera and with this connected to a Raspberry Pi the authors are
able to detect three different drone types up to a distance of 100m.
One of the things the authors mention is that it is the battery and not
the motors, as one may presume, that is the most significant source
of heat radiation.
With the background from this paper and the ones above, this the-
sis will try to extend these finding using a higher resolution sensor
(FLIR Boson with 320x256 pixels) in combination with machine learn-
4 introduction
ing methods to build a system that automatically detects, classifies

and tracks drones. The IR-camera will also be combined with at least
one additional sensor.
The possible advantages of using not only video in the visible range
but also a thermal infrared camera are explored to some extent in
[12]. In the paper, from 2019, the authors describe how they combine
the sensors with deep-learning-based detection and tracking modules.
The IR-videos used are stated to have a resolution of 1920x1080, but
unfortunately, the sensor is not specified in any further detail.
To detect the drones, a Faster-RCNN is implemented and since "it

is more difficult to acquire enough training data for training the thermal
drone detector", the authors of [12] also successfully explore the pos-
sibility to use a modified Cycle-GAN (General Adversarial Network)
to produce synthetic thermal training data.
The paper presents results using curves of the precision and recall
of the detector and the authors conclude that "In both real-world and
synthetic thermal datasets, the thermal detector achieves better performance
than the visible detector". Sadly any details on the distance between the
sensor and the target drone is omitted.
Finally, the authors claim that the visible and thermal datasets used
are made available as the "USC drone detection and tracking dataset",
without giving any link to it in the paper. This dataset is also men-
tioned in [13], but the link found in that paper is unfortunately not
working.
Compared to the results of [12], as summarized above, this thesis

will make use of three different drone types instead of just one in
the data set. It will also expand the number of target classes of the
detector to four and additionally explore the detection performance
as a function of sensor-to-target distance.
A thermal infrared camera is also used as one of the sensors in

[14], but just as pointed out in [5], this paper, like several others, fails
to specify the type, field of view or even the resolution of the used
sensors, so even if there are useful tables of the results in that paper,
any comparison is unfortunately hard to achieve.
1.1.2 Sensors in the visible range
A widespread method to detect drones, as described in recent scien-

tific papers, is to combine a video camera with a detector based on a
1.1 related work 5
convolutional neural network (CNN).
One of these papers, published in 2017, is [15] making an in-depth

study of the performance of six different CNN-models for the drone
detection task. The paper presents metrics for training time and per-
formance in speed (frames per second) as well as curves for preces-
sion and recall. After comparing the six different solutions, the au-
thors conclude that "considering speed and accuracy trade-offs, YOLOv21
might be the most appropriate detection model in our system".
As it turns out, when studying the subject of drone detection in im-

ages in the visible range, the YOLOv2-architecture [16] is very com-
mon. In [13], [17], [18] and [19] this is the preferred and implemented
CNN-model. A lightweight version of the more recent YOLOv3 is uti-
lized in [20].
The success of the YOLOv2 motivates the use of it in this thesis.

This choice will also make it possible to compare the results to the
papers mentioned above. To be able to match the results from the
thermal infrared sensor, the YOLOv2 is also used in that part.
The fact that the two primary sensors (IR and visible) of the drone
detector system in this thesis are placed on a pan/tilt platform also
arises the need for a wide-angle sensor to steer the sensors in direc-
tions where suspicious objects appear. In [20] a static camera with
110◦ field of view (FoV) is used to align a rotating narrow-field cam-
era (the images from this is analysed with the YOLOv3-model as
pointed out above). To find the objects to be investigated further by
the narrow-field camera, the video stream from the wide-angle one is
analysed by means of a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) foreground
detector in one of the setups evaluated in [20].
The GMM foreground detector will also be implemented in this

thesis for the wide-angle sensor. However, the one used in this case
has an even wider FoV (180◦ ). Just as pointed out in [20], this setup is
prone to produce false alarms in some situations, but as described in
Section 3.1.3, this can be mitigated by tuning the associated detection
and tracking algorithms.
Of the papers found using versions of the YOLO-architecture for

drone detection, [17] has the most output target classes with three
(drone, airplane and helicopter) followed by [19] with two classes
(drone and bird). None of the YOLO-papers report the detection ac-
curacy as a function of the sensor-to-target distance.
1 You Only Look Once in its second version

6 introduction
1.1.3 Acoustic sensors
Numerous papers are also exploring the possibility to detect drones

using acoustic sensors. Some of these papers, like [21], [22] and [23]
utilize the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract features from the
audio signals.
However, it is observed that the Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coeffi-

cients (MFCC) seems to be the most common feature extraction tech-
nique, as used in [24], [25], [26] and [27]. The MFCC is "a non-linear
mapping of the original frequency according to the auditory mechanism of
the human ear. It is the most commonly used audio feature in current recog-
nition tasks" [25].
When comparing three different classification models for the drone

detection task, the authors of [26] comes to the conclusion that the
Long Short-Term Memory achieves the best performance and F1-score.
In that paper, the classification is binary (drone or background). This
thesis expands the range of output classes of [26] by adding a heli-
copter class.
The maximum acoustic detection range reported in the reviewed

paper is 290 m [28], this when using a 120-element microphone ar-
ray and a DJI Phantom 2 drone. It is worth noting that the the DJI
Flame Wheel F450, one of the drones used in this thesis, is detected
at distance of 160 m by the microphone array.
1.1.4 RADAR
Since RADAR is the most common technology to detect flying objects,

it is not far fetched to apply this also to the detection of drones. Do-
ing this with a RADAR-system designed to detect aircraft is however
not as straight forward as it might seem. This since those systems
often have features to reduce unwanted echoes from small, slow and
low-flying objects, which is precisely what characterise the drones in
question.
The small Radar Cross Sections (RCS) of medium-sized consumer

drones are well described in [29], and from [30] we have that the RCS
of the DJI Flame Wheel F450 is -17 dBsm (0.02 m2 ). The results of [31]
points out that flying birds have similar RCS, something that can lead
to false targets when detecting drones.
The F450 drone is also used in [32], where the micro-doppler char-
acteristics of drones are investigated. These are typically echoes from
the moving blades of the propellers and can be detected on top of the
1.1 related work 7
bulk motion doppler signal of the drone. Since the propellers are gen-
erally made from plastic materials, the RCS of these parts are even
smaller, and in [29] it is stated that the echoes from the propellers
are 20 to 25 dB weaker than that of the drone body itself. Neverthe-
less, papers like [33], [34] and [35] all accompany [32] in exploring
the possibility to classify drones using the micro-doppler signature.
1.1.5 Other drone detection techniques
Very few drones are autonomous in the flight phase. Generally, they
are controlled by means of a manned ground equipment, and often
the drones themself also send out information on some radio fre-
quency (RF). The three drones used in this thesis are all controlled in
real-time. The information sent out by the drones can range from just
simple telemetry data such as battery level (DJI Flame wheel F450),
a live video stream (Hubsan H107D+), to both a video stream and
extensive position and status information (DJI Phantom 4 Pro).
Utilizing the RF-fingerprint is described in [36], and in [37] a CNN

is used to process the information from an antenna array so that the
direction to the drone controller can be calculated within a few de-
grees. In [38], signals from 15 different drone controllers are classi-
fied with an accuracy of 98.13% using only three RF-features1 in a
K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) classifier.
The use of LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) and LADAR

(LAser Detection And Ranging) in combination with background sub-
traction and a nearest neighbour classifier is shown to successfully
detect drones up to a distance of 2 km in [39].
1.1.6 Sensor fusion
As shown in [7] the fusion of data from multiple sensors, i.e. using
several sensors in combination to achieve more accurate results than
derived from single sensors, while compensating for their individual
weaknesses, is well-founded when it comes to the drone detection
task.
As mentioned above, the benefits of sensor fusion are also pointed

out in [10], and in [40] the authors describe that "Audio detection,
video detection, and RF detection are conducted in parallel. We consider
that missed detection of the intruding drone will bring more security threats
than false alarm. Therefore, we use logical or operation to fuse the results of
the above three detectors and obtain the final decision".
1 Shape factor, kurtosis (the tailedness of the energy curve), and the variance
8 introduction
Furthermore under the section Challenges and Open Research Is-

sues they conclude that "Although we have realized basic functions for
drone surveillance in our anti-drone system, new challenges have been raised,
and there are still some open research issues to be addressed: Heterogeneous
Information Fusion: The result of drone detection should be more than a sim-
ple combination of the results separately obtained by audio, video, and RF
surveillance, which will induce great information loss. It is of great signif-
icance to develop reliable techniques for the fusion of audio, video, and RF
information from the aspect of feature fusion and decision fusion".
Without any further specifications of the sensors used besides that

they are visible, thermal and 2D-radar [14] presents promising results
from experiments using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to perform
sensor fusion in a drone detector/classifier with just one output class.
Just as in [7] this thesis also considers early and late sensor fusion
and differentiate these two principles based on if the sensor data is
fused before or after the detection element.
1.1.7 Drone detection datasets
As mentioned above, [5] points out the lack of a publicly available

dataset. This is also the case in [7] where the authors highlight this es-
pecially in the case of thermal infrared cameras and conclude that "the
creation of a dataset for UAV detection and classification based on thermal
images without an increased budget might be out of reach for many univer-
sities and research centers". Furthermore, they also state that "there is a
strong need for the collection of a real-world UAV audio dataset that could
serve as a benchmark for researchers to develop their algorithms".
In the references of [7], there are two useful links to datasets for vis-
ible video detectors. One of these is [41], where 500 annotated drone
images can be found. The other link leads to the dataset [42] of the
Drone-vs-Bird challenge held by the Horizon2020 SafeShore project
consortium. However, the dataset is only available upon request and
with restrictions to the usage and sharing of the data. The Drone-vs-
Bird challenge is also mentioned in [18], [19] and by the winning team
of the challenge in 2017 [43]. The results from the 2019 Drone-vs-Bird
challenge is presented in [44].
The dataset used in [20] is not publicly available due to confidential-

ity. Since the work of that paper was founded by the French Ministry
of Defence, one can presume that the dataset, in one way or another,
is a property of the French Government or the French Armed Forces.
1.2 thesis scope 9
1.2 thesis scope
The scope of this thesis is twofold: First, to explore the possibilities

and limitations of designing and constructing an automatic multi-
sensor drone detection system building on state-of-the-art methods
and techniques. In some cases, these methods will also be extended
from conclusions and recommendations found in the related work.
This extension is achieved by the use of a different sensor combi-
nation, exploring the performance based on the sensor-to-target dis-
tance, increasing the number of target classes, and incorporating a
novel sensor fusion method for the drone detection task.
The second object of the thesis is to collect, compose and publish

a drone detection dataset. This dataset should contain data from as
many of the sensors used as possible. The data and the associated
annotations should be in standard formats, so that the data can be
imported, reviewed and even edited by others.
Thus, this thesis can be seen as incorporating all phases of design-

ing an embedded and intelligent system. From the initial literature
study, the subsequent assessment and procurement of suitable sen-
sors and hardware components, the design and 3D-printing of parts
that are not available, the programming and training of the system,
and finally evaluating it and reporting the results. In this case, the
thesis also includes the collection and composition of the required
dataset.
A key doctrine and principle of this thesis will be that to effectively

detect the sought after drones the system must also, by all possible
means, detect and keep track of other flying objects that are likely to
be mistaken for a drone. This follows directly from the conclusions of
[18] and [19].
1.2.1 Thesis system specifications and limitations
The system designed in this thesis shall:
• Utilize thermal infrared, visible video and acoustic sensors to

detect and classify drones
• Incorporate an ADS-B1 receiver, so that objects flying with an
active transponder can be tracked
• Have four output target classes: airplane2 , bird, drone and heli-
copter3
1 Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast

2 Manned fixed-wing aircraft
3 Manned rotary-wing aircraft
10 introduction
• Have a time constraint on the pan/tilt servo control loop so

that it can track an object flying in front of the system at normal
speeds
• Be close to real-time in the sense that the time from possible
classification to output is no more than one second
• Use components of standard type, e.g. not of military-grade, so
that it can easily be compared to other detection systems
• Be a stand-alone solution in the sense that it will work without
an active internet connection
Moreover, the thesis shall include:
• An evaluation of detection and classification performance as a

function of the sensor-to-target distance
• An assessment of the possibilities to use early or late sensor
fusion
• The composition and publication of a multi-class, multi-sensor
dataset
There are also some limitations to the scope of this thesis and some
of these are that:
• The system will not be completely weather-proof

• It will not have any effector part, i.e. the system will not try to
bring the flying drone down or in any other way take control of
it
• In the work LIDAR, RF, humans or animals will not be consid-
ered as sensors to be used in the system setup
• Fixed-wing drones or drones of helicopter type will not be con-
sidered, neither very rare aircraft types such as lighter-than-air
balloons etc.
A description of the methods and materials used in this thesis is

found below in Chapter 2. The results are found in Chapter 3, fol-
lowed by an interpretation of the findings in Chapter 4. Finally, in
Chapter 5 the main points are summarised together with research
questions raised by the results.
M E T H O D S A N D M AT E R I A L S
2
This chapter describes the proposed methodology and the automatic
drone detection system is also outlined. First, on a system-level and
thereafter in deeper detail, both regarding hardware components, how
they are connected to the main computational resource, and the in-
volved software.
As pointed out in [5] “Most of the research in visual drone detection

fails to specify the type of the acquisition device, the drone type, the detec-
tion range, and the dataset used in their research. These details are key to
validate the work and make it comparable with related literature”. Hence
the hardware used is initially specified in detail.
After that follows a description of the software running in the

drone detection system when it is active, including the graphical user
interface. The support software used for such tasks as to collect data,
to set up the detectors and to evaluate the performance after training
is also described. For all parts that include a machine learning feature,
the training process is also presented.
Finally, the methods used for the composition of the drone detec-
tion dataset are described, including the division of the dataset ac-
cording to the sensor type, target class and sensor-to-target distance
bin.
Since Matlab (version R2019b) is used as the primary development

environment, the thesis text complies with the Matlab terminology so
that all programs are called scripts and what is commonly known as a
thread is denoted as a worker. To indicate the Matlab functions used,
these are printed in a different font, e.g. trainYOLOv2ObjectDetector.
In addition to the basic Matlab environment, the following toolboxes
are also utilized:
• Image acquisition, including package for video interface

• Image processing
• Computer vision
• Statistics and machine learning
• Deep learning, including model for MobileNetv2 network
• Audio
• Communication
• Parallel computing
11
12 methods and materials
2.1 proposed methodology
An efficient drone detection system must have the capability to both

cover a large volume of airspace, and at the same time have the res-
olution enough to distinct the drone from other objects. Combining
wide and narrow field of view-cameras is one way to accomplish this
[20]. Another way, shown in [17], is to use an array of high-resolution
cameras. Since this thesis incorporates only one infrared sensor, with
a fixed field of view, there is no possibility to have neither a wide-
angle infrared sensor or an array of such sensors. The proposed way
to achieve the desired volume coverage with the IR-sensor is to have
it on a moving platform. This platform can then either have objects
assigned to it or search by itself, at moments in time when the sensors
on it are not busy detecting and classifying objects.
To be able to react to moving objects and also to have the ability to

track those, the combined time-constraints of the detection cycle and
the control loop of the moving platform means that the system must
work in close to real-time. Hence, all the detection and classification
processes must be done efficiently and with as little delay as possible.
The feedback loop of the moving platform must run at sub-second
speed.
To be able to put together such a system, involving both several

sensors and mechanical part makes the importance of choosing the
right methods critical. While reviewing the theoretical foundations of
machine learning techniques, and at the same time look at the practi-
cal results reported it is clear that such methods can be found.
This thesis will utilize three machine learning techniques. Two of

these are supervised, and one is unsupervised. First, it has two detec-
tors and classifiers build around the YOLOv2-architecture [16]. Both
these can be seen as a form of transfer learning, since the feature
extraction parts build on an already-trained network. The YOLOv2-
networks are trained using a dataset with an annotated ground truth.
Hereinafter, in this theses, by detection we mean the process of both
detecting the area where the object is in an image and the classifica-
tion that assigns it to one of the labels or classes found in the ground
truth of the training dataset.
Furthermore, the second supervised machine learning technique

used is a classification function building on the LSTM-architecture
[45]. Since this is not detecting the position of an object, but only as-
signs the input to the network to one of three label classes, we will
refer to this process just as classification.
2.2 system architecture 13
Finally, an unsupervised technique is also used in the drone detec-

tion system. This is based on the segmentation of images using GMM
background subtraction [46]. By employing this image segmentation,
the system is able to find moving objects in the field of view of the
wide-angle camera. This will also be referred to as detection even if it
does not involve a classification of the object seen as in the YOLOv2-
case. Since we are not providing the detector with any ground truth
of what is foreground and background, this process falls under the
category of unsupervised machine learning techniques.
One of the conclusions found in the related work is that to be able

to detect the drones with high enough efficiency, the system must
also recognize and keep track of other flying objects that are likely to
be mistaken for a drone. For some of these drone-like objects, this is
indigenous hard, e.g. birds. For others, it is technically possible since
some of them announce their presence and location via radio. The
technical system for this is the ADS-B, over which most aircraft regu-
larly transmit messages with varied content.
Combining the data from several sensors under the time constraints
described above must be kept simple and streamlined. This together
with the fact that very few papers are exploring sensor fusion tech-
niques is the motivation to have a system where the inclusion and
weights of the sensors can be altered at runtime to find a feasible set-
ting.
To be able to accomplish the necessary training of the detectors and

classifiers, a dataset is also collected. The annotation of this is done
so that the dataset can be inspected, edited and used by others. The
fact that the datasets for the thermal infrared and the visible video
sensors are collected under the same conditions, and using the same
targets ensures that a comparison between the two sensor types is
well-founded.
2.2 system architecture
The system utilizes a thermal infrared camera (IRcam) and a video

camera (Vcam) as the primary electro-optical sensors for the detec-
tion and classification. To keep track of cooperative aircraft1 in the
airspace, ADS-B information is made available in the system. Audio
data is used to detect if a drone or a helicopter is in the vicinity of the
system using their respective distinctive sounds when they are air-
borne. All computations in the system are made in a standard laptop.
This is also used to present the detection results to the user. The sys-
1 Cooperative aircraft are here defined as being equipped with an equipment that
broadcasts the aircraft’s position, velocity vectors and identification information
tem architecture including the principal layout of the graphical user

interface (GUI) is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The system architecture with hardware and software components.
Due to the limited field of view of the IRcam, it is placed together

with the Vcam on a pan/tilt platform that can be aimed in specific
directions guided by information gathered by a fisheye lens camera
(Fcam) covering 180◦ horizontally and 90◦ vertically. If nothing is de-
tected and tracked by the Fcam, the platform can be set to move in
two different search patterns to scan the skies around the system. Fig-
ure 3 shows the main parts of the system.
2.2 system architecture 15
Figure 3: The main parts of the drone detection system. On the lower left the
microphone and above that the fisheye lens camera. On the pan
and tilt platform in the middle are the IR- and video cameras. The
holder for the servo controller and power relay boards is placed
behind the pan servo inside the aluminium mounting channel.
2.3 hardware
To have a stable base for the system, all hardware components, ex-
cept the laptop, are mounted on a standard surveyors tripod. This
solution also facilitates the deployment of the system outdoors, as
shown in Figure 4. Due to the nature of the system, it must also eas-
ily be transported to and from any deployment. Hence a transport
solution is available where the system can be disassembled into a few
large parts and placed in a transport box.
Figure 4: The system deployed just north of the runway at Halmstad airport.
2.3 hardware 17
Just as in the design of any embedded system, the power consump-

tion of the system components have also been taken into considera-
tion, not to overload the laptop’s built-in ports and the added USB-
hub. For this purpose, the current drawn by all components have
been measured using a Ruideng AT34 tester.
2.3.1 Thermal infrared camera
The thermal infrared camera used is a FLIR Breach PTQ-136 using

the Boson 320x256 pixels detector. The field of view of the IR-camera
is 24◦ horizontally and 19◦ vertically. Figure 5 shows an image taken
from the IRcam video stream.
Figure 5: The F450 drone flying at a distance of 3 m in front on the IRcam.
Notably, the Boson sensor of the FLIR Breach has a higher resolu-
tion than the one used in [11] where a FLIR Lepton sensor with 80x60
pixels was used. In that paper, the authors were able to detect three
different drone types up to a distance of 100m, however this detection
was done manually by a person looking at the live video stream and
not, as in this thesis, by means of a trained embedded and intelligent
system.
The IRcam has two output formats, a raw 320x256 pixels format
(Y16 with 16-bit greyscale) and an interpolated 640x512 pixels im-
age in the I420 format (12 bits per pixel). For the interpolated image
format, the colour palette can be changed, and several other image
processing features are also available. In the system, the raw format
is used to avoid the extra overlaid text information of the interpolated
image. This choice also grants a better control of the image process-
ing operations as they are implemented in Matlab instead.
The output from the IRcam is sent to the laptop via a USB-C port
at a rate of 60 frames per second (FPS). The IRcam is also powered
via the USB connection.
2.3.2 Video camera
A Sony HDR-CX405 video camera is used to record the scenes in the

visible range of the spectrum. The output of this camera is an HDMI-
signal and hence a frame grabber in the form of an Elgato Cam Link
4K is used to feed the laptop with a 1280x720 video stream in YUY2-
format (16 bits per pixel) at 50 FPS.
The Vcam has an adjustable zoom lens, and with this, the field of
view can be set to be both wider or narrower than that described
above of the IRcam. The Vcam is set to have about the same field of
view as the IRcam.
2.3.3 Fisheye lens camera
To monitor a larger part of the surroundings of the system an ELP

8 megapixel 180◦ fisheye lens camera is also used. This outputs a
1024x768 video stream in Mjpg-format at 30 FPS via a USB connector.
2.3.4 Microphone
To be able to capture the distinct sound that drones emit when flying
a Boya BY-MM1 mini cardioid directional microphone is also con-
nected to the laptop.
2.3.5 RADAR module
As described in the specification of the system architecture in Sec-

tion 2.2 a RADAR module is not incorporated final design. However,
since one was available, it was assessed to be included and hence
also described in this section. In Section 3.1.5 the performance of the
RADAR module is described, and the exclusion of it is motivated by
the short practical detection range. Figure 6 shows the radar module
and some of its features.
2.3 hardware 19
Figure 6: The radar module K-MD2. From [47].
Furthermore, [47] describes the module as "a high-end 3D radar

transceiver with three receiving channels and a low phase noise, PLL1 con-
trolled transmitter. The target information from the three receive antennas
is digitized and the high speed digital signal processing performs range and
doppler FFT’s with an update rate of 20 measurements per second. Using the
serial interface, many operating parameters such as frequency, bandwidth
and repetition rate can be adjusted. Results are available in target list format
as well as in raw range-doppler matrices. Ethernet and a serial communica-
tion interfaces are included".
Interestingly, the K-MD2 radar module is also found to be used in

another research project connected to drones. In [48] it is utilized, not
to detect drones, but instead mounted on board one as part of the
navigation aids in GNSS2 denied environments.
2.3.6 ADS-B receiver
To track aircraft equipped with transponders, an ADS-B receiver is

also used. This consists of an antenna and a NooElec Nano 2+ Soft-
ware Defined Radio receiver (SDR). This is tuned to 1090 MHz so that
the identification and positional data sent out as a part of the 1 Hz
squitter message can be decoded and displayed. The Nano 2+ SDR
receiver is connected to the laptop using USB.
1 Phase-locked loop
2 Global Navigation Satellite System
2.3.7 GPS receiver
To present the decoded ADS-B data in a correct way the system is also
equipped with a G-STAR IV BU-353S4 GPS receiver connected via
USB. The receiver outputs messages following the National Marine
Electronics Association (NMEA) format standard.
2.3.8 Pan/tilt platform including servo controller
To be able to detect targets in a wider field of view than just 24◦ hori-
zontally and 19◦ vertically the IR- and video cameras are mounted on
a pan/tilt platform. This is the Servocity DDT-560H direct drive tilt
platform together with the DDP-125 Pan assembly, also from Servoc-
ity. To achieve the pan/tilt motion two Hitec HS-7955TG servos are
used.
A Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB servo controller is included

so that the respective position of the servos can be controlled from the
laptop. Since the servos have shown a tendency to vibrate when hold-
ing the platform in specific directions a third channel of the servo
controller is also used to give the possibility to switch on and off the
power to the servos using a small optoisolated relay board.
To supply the servos with the necessary voltage and power, both a
net adapter and a DC-DC converter are available. The DC-DC solu-
tion is used when the system is deployed outdoors and, for simplicity,
it uses the same battery type as one of the available drones.
Some other parts from Actobotics are also used in the mounting
of the system and the following has been designed and 3D-printed:
adapters for the IR-, video- and fisheye lens cameras, a radar module
mounting plate and a case for the servo controller and power relay
boards.
A lighter version of the IR- and video camera mounting, without

the pan/tilt platform, has also been prepared. This is used on a light
camera tripod when collecting data and hence simplifies both trans-
porting the setup and also the possibility for a person to manually set
the direction of it. The data collection setup is shown in Figure 7.
2.4 software 21
Figure 7: The data collection setup.
2.3.9 Laptop
The computational part of the system is done on a Dell Latitude 5401

laptop. This is equipped with an Intel i7-9850H CPU and an Nvidia
MX150 GPU. The laptop is connected to all of the above-mentioned
sensors and the servo controller using the built-in ports and an addi-
tional USB-hub, as shown in Figure 4.
2.4 software
The software used in the thesis can be divided into two parts. First,
the software running in the system when it is deployed, as depicted
in Figure 2. Additionally, there is also a set of support software used
for tasks such as to form the training data sets and to train the system.
2.4.1 System software
The software running when the drone detector is deployed consists

of the main script and five "workers", as shown in Figure 2. These are
threads running in parallel, and having such is enabled by the Mat-
lab parallel computing toolbox. The transfer of messages between the
main program and the workers is done using pollable data queues.
Only commands and results are sent and hence the displays of the
video streams are part of the respective worker.
The Fcam worker utilizes a foreground/background detector to-

gether with a multi-object Kalman filter tracker, and after calculating
the position of the best-tracked target1 , it sends the azimuth and ele-
vation angles to the main program. Based on this, the main program
can then control the pan/tilt platform servos via the servo controller,
so that the moving object can be analysed further by the IR- and video
cameras.
The IRcam and Vcam workers are similar in their basic structure
and both import and run a trained YOLOv2 detector and classifier.
The information sent to the main script is the class of the detected tar-
get, the confidence2 , and the horizontal and vertical offsets in degrees
from the centre point of the image. The latter information is used by
the main script to calculate servo commands when an object is being
tracked by the system.
The Audio worker sends information about the class and confi-
dence to the main script. Unlike the others, the ADS-B worker has
two output queues. One is consisting of current tracks and the other
of the history tracks. This is done so that the presentation clearly
shows the heading and altitude changes of the targets.
All of the above workers also send a confirmation of the command

from the main script to run the detector/classifier or to be idle. The
number of frames per second currently processed is also sent to the
main script.
Looking further into the different output classes or labels that the
main code can receive from the workers, as shown in Table 1, it is clear
that not all sensors can output all the target classes used in this thesis.
Furthermore, the audio worker has an additional background class
and the ADS-B will output the NoData-class if the vehicle category
1 Defined to be the one with the longest track history

2 This is the class-specific confidence score for each bounding box, i.e. the product of
the conditional class probability and the individual bounding box prediction confi-
dence, as defined in 49
2.4 software 23
field of the received message is empty (this is not a mandatory field

as we will come back to in Section 2.4.1.6).
Table 1: The output classes of the sensors, and their corresponding class
colours.
The main script and all the workers are set up so that they can be
run independently of each other in a stand-alone mode. The reason
for this is to facilitate the development and tuning without having to
set up the whole physical system.
2.4.1.1 Main script
The main script is the core of the system software, as shown in Fig-
ure 2. Besides initially starting the five workers (threads) and setting
up the queues to communicate with these, the main script also sends
commands to and reads data from the servo controller and the GPS-
receiver, respectively. After the start-up sequence, the script goes into
a loop that runs until the program is stopped by the user via the
graphical user interface (GUI).
Updating the GUI and reading user inputs are the most frequent
tasks done on every iteration of the loop. At regular intervals, the
main script also interacts with the workers and the servo controller.
Servo positions are read and queues are polled ten times a second.
Within this part, the system results, i.e. the system output label and
confidence, are also calculated using the most recent results from the
workers. Furthermore, at a rate of 5 Hz new commands are sent to the
servo controller for execution. Every two seconds the ADS-B plot is
updated. Having different intervals for various tasks makes the script
more efficient since, for example, an aircraft sends out its position via
ADS-B every second, and hence updating the ADS-B plots to often
would only be a waste of computational resources. The main script
pseudocode is shown in Algorithm 1.
Algorithm 1 Main script pseudocode

1: Start of main
2: connect to the servo controller
3: start a parallel pool with five workers
4: setup queues for data from the workers
5: start the workers
6: poll the queues from the workers to get the queues to the workers
7: set up and start the GUI
8: while GUI is not closed do
9: if time since last execution > 0.1s then
10: read servo positions
11: communicate with workers
12: calculate system output label and confidence
13: end if
14: if time since last execution > 0.2s then
15: send control signals to the servos
16: update the servo controller indicator
17: end if
18: if time since last execution > 2s then
19: update the ADS-B plots
20: end if
21: read and execute user commands
22: update status and control panels
23: end while
24: stop workers
25: shut down the parallel pool
26: turn off the power to the servos
27: disconnect from the servo controller
28: End of main
The use of workers will also allow the different detectors to run
asynchronously, i.e. handling as many frames per second as possible
without any inter-sensor delays and waiting time.
The sensor fusion is an essential part of the main code and every
time the main script polls the worker’s queues it puts the results in
a 4x4 matrix, organized so that each class is a column and each sen-
sor is a row. The value depends not only on the class label and the
confidence but also on the setting of which sensors to include and the
weight of the specific sensor, i.e. how much we trust it at the moment.
A new 1x4 array is then formed by taking the column-wise sums

of the result matrix. This array is in turn placed as a new row in a
10x4 first-in-first-out time-smoothing matrix. Since we have close to
ten FPS from the workers, this will be the results of approximately
the last second. Once again the 10 columns are summarized into a
2.4 software 25
1x4 array, and the column with the highest value will be the output
system class.
The system output confidence is calculated by normalizing the

value found to be highest, over the number of sensors included at
the moment. An additional condition before presenting the system
result is also that the number of sensors that detects any object has to
fulfil the GUI-setting, as shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Two examples of sensor fusion results.
2.4.1.2 IRcam worker
The start-up process of the IRcam worker is to first connect to the

queue it gets from the main script in the function declaration. Since it
is only possible for the main script to set up a queue from the worker,
the IRcam worker uses that queue to send a queue to the main script.
In this way, a bidirectional communication is established and hence
the worker can both send information about the detections, and re-
ceive commands, such as when to run the detector and when to go

idle.
If no queue is given to the IRcam worker function when it is started,

the function assumes that it is running in a stand-alone mode and acts
accordingly.
The next actions taken at start-up is loading the detector and con-
necting to the IR-camera. The video stream is thereafter started and
set to be continuous using the triggerconfig-command, so that the
worker can use the getsnaphot-function to read an image at any time
within the loop it goes into when running.
The IR camera has several mounting points and when attached

to the 3D-printed adapter, on which it and the video camera are
mounted, the raw image output stream is upside down. Hence, the
first image processing operation is imrotate followed by imflatfield
with σ = 30 1 and then imadjust to increase the contrast of the image.
Next, the input image is processed by the YOLOv2-detector, with a

given detection threshold and the execution environment set to GPU.
The output from the detector consists of an array of class labels, con-
fidence scores and bounding boxes for all objects that have been de-
tected and classified. The detector output may be no data at all, or
just as well, data for several detected objects. In this implementation,
only the detection with the highest confidence score is sent to the
main script.
The image from the IR camera is just 320x256 pixels, so in order

to present the result in the GUI using a window similar in size to
the video camera output, the image is resized to 640x512 pixels. Then
the bounding box together with the class label and confidence score
are inserted in the image. To clearly indicate the detected class the
inserted annotation uses the same colour scheme as presented in Ta-
ble 1.
To give information about the current state of the detector and the
performance in terms of frames per second (FPS), this information is
also inserted in the top left corner of the image. The current frames
per second processed by the worker is also sent to the main script
together with the detection results.
The YOLOv2 detector is set up and trained using one of the scripts
belonging to the support software. The YOLOv2 is formed by mod-
1 The flat-field correction uses Gaussian smoothing with a standard deviation of σ to

approximate the shading component of the input image
2.4 software 27
ifying a pretrained MobileNetv2 following [50], so that the first 12

layers, out of 53, are used for feature extraction. The input layer is
updated1 so that is has the size of 256x256x3. The choice of this par-
ticular size is motivated by the fact that the image is always resized to
fit the input layer. This resize operation will always make the image
smaller or keep it at its original size, so using 256 causes the least
information loss since it is the height of the IR images.
Six detection layers and three final layers are also added to the net-
work. Besides setting the number of output classes of the final layers
the anchor boxes used are also specified.
To estimate the numbers of anchor boxes to use and the size of

these the training data is processed using the estimateAnchorBoxes-
function. This function uses a k-means clustering algorithm to find
suitable anchor boxes sizes given the number of boxes to be used. A
script from the support software loops through the number of anchor
boxes from one to nine to provide a plot over the mean intersection
over union (IoU)2 as a function of the number of boxes as shown in
Figure 9.
Figure 9: Plot used to assess the number of anchor boxes to be implemented

in the IRcam worker YOLOv2 detector.
When choosing the number of anchor boxes to use the trade-off

to consider is that a high IoU ensures that the anchor boxes overlap
well with the bounding boxes of the training data but, on the other
1 The original input layer of the MobileNetv2 is 224x224x3 in size.
2 This is the intersection area of two bounding boxes divided by the union of their
respective areas. This provides a scale invariant measurement of the bounding boxes
matching.
hand, using more anchor boxes will also increase the computational
cost and may lead to overfitting. After assessing the plot, the num-
ber of anchor boxes is chosen to be three and the sizes of these, with
the scaling factor of 0.8 in width to match the downsize of the in-
put layer from 320 to 256 pixels, are taken from the output of the
estimateAnchorBoxes-function.
The detector is trained using data picked from the available dataset
after the evaluation data have been selected and put aside, as de-
scribed in Section 2.6. The training data for the IRcam YOLOv2 de-
tector consists of 120 video clips, each one just over 10 seconds and
evenly distributed among all classes and all distance bins, making
the total number of annotated images in the training set 37428. The
detector is trained for five epochs1 using the stochastic gradient de-
scent with momentum (SGDM) optimizer and an initial learning rate
of 0.001.
Using a computer with an Nvidia GeForce RTX2070 8GB GPU, the

time for five epochs is 2 h 15 min. The training time of the IRcam
worker YOLOv2-detector for one epoch using different hardware is
shown in Table 2.
Table 2: Training time for one epoch of the IR dataset.
Computing hardware Time for one epoch
GPU GeForce RTX2070 8GB 39 min

GPU GeForce MX150 2GB 6 h 58 min
CPU i7 9850H 16GB RAM 8 h 53 min
Since the training data is specified as a table and not using the
datastore-format the trainYOLOv2ObjectDetector-function performs
preprocessing augmentation automatically. The augmentation imple-
mented is reflection, scaling, and changing brightness, hue, saturation
and contrast.
2.4.1.3 Vcam worker
The Vcam worker is very similar to the IRcam worker, with some
exceptions. The input image from the Vcam is 1280x720 pixels, and
directly after the getsnapshot-function, it is resized to 640x512 pix-
els. This is the only image processing operation done to the visible
video image. The input layer of the YOLOv2 detector has a size of
416x416x3. The increased size, compared to the detector in the IRcam
worker, is directly reflected in the FPS performance of the detector.
1 An epoch is a pass through the whole dataset

2.4 software 29
Due to the increased image size used to train the detector, the train-
ing time is also extended compared to the IR case. When using a com-
puter with an Nvidia GeForce RTX2070 8GB GPU, the time for one
epoch is 2 h 25 min, which is significantly longer than what is pre-
sented in Table 2. The training set consists of 37519 images, and the
detector is trained for five epochs just as the detector of the IRcam
worker.
2.4.1.4 Fcam worker
Initially, the fisheye lens camera was mounted facing upwards, but,
as it turned out, this caused the image distortion to be significant in
the area just above the horizon where the interesting targets usually
appear. After turning the camera so that it faces forward, as can be
seen in Figure 3, the motion detector is less affected by the image
distortion, and since half of the field of view is not used anyway, this
is a feasible solution. Initially, the image was cropped so that the half
where the pan/tilt platform obscures the view was not used. Now
instead, the part of the image covering the area below the horizon in
front of the system is not processed.
The Fcam worker sets up queues and connects to the camera much
in the same way as the IRcam and Vcam workers. The input im-
age from the camera is 1024x768 pixels, and immediately after the
getsnapshot-function the lower part of the image is cropped so that
1024x384 pixels remain to be processed.
The image is then analysed using the ForegroundDetector-function

of the Computer vision toolbox. This uses a background subtraction
algorithm based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The output
from this function is a binary mask where moving objects are ones,
and the stationary background is zero ideally. The mask is next pro-
cessed with the imopen-function that first performs a morphological
erosion followed by a dilation. The structural element parameter of
the imopen-function is set to just 3x3 so that only very small objects
are deleted.
To get rid of noise from the parts of the square-shaped image sensor
that lie outside the circular area seen by the fisheye lens, the mask im-
age is also multiplied with another binary mask before it is processed
by the BlobAnalysis-function. This outputs an array of centroids and
bounding boxes for all objects that are considered to be moving.
All these centroids and bounding boxes are sent to a Kalman filter
multi-object tracker, which is a customised version of a script avail-
able in one of the Matlab computer vision toolbox tutorials [51]. Out
of the tracks started and updated by the Kalman filter, the one with
the longest track history is picked out and marked as the best one. In
the Fcam presentation window all tracks, both updated and predicted
are visualised and the track considered to be the best is also marked
with red colour. With the press of a button in the GUI, the user can
choose to show the moving object mask in the presentation window
instead of the normal fisheye lens camera image. This is shown in
Figure 10
Figure 10: The normal Fcam image and track presentation above, and the
moving object mask image below.
The output from the Fcam worker is the FPS-status, together with
the elevation and azimuth angles of the best track, if such track ex-
ists at the moment. Out of all the workers, the Fcam is the one with
most tuning parameters. This involves choosing and tuning the im-
age processing operations, the foreground detector and blob analysis
settings, and finally the multi-object Kalman filter tracker parameters.
2.4.1.5 Audio worker
The audio worker uses the attached directional microphone and col-
lects acoustic data in a one-second long buffer (44100 samples), set to
be updated 20 times per second. To classify the source of the sound in
the buffer, it is first processed with the mfcc-function from the Audio
toolbox. Based on empirical trails, the parameter LogEnergy is set to
Ignore, and then the extracted features are sent to the classifier.
2.4 software 31
The LSTM-classifier used consists of an input layer, two bidirec-

tional LSTM layers with a drop out layer in between, a fully connected
layer, followed by a softmax layer and a classification layer. The clas-
sifier builds on [52] but with the extension of increasing the number
of classes from two to three and an additional dropout layer between
the bidirectional LSTM layers.
Since the audio database has 30 ten-second clips of each of the

output classes, five clips from each class are set aside to be used for
evaluation. The remaining audio clips are used for the training pro-
cess. Out of each ten-second clip the last second is used for validation
and the rest for training. The classifier is first trained for 250 epochs,
but show signs of overfitting as can be seen in Figure 11 with the
error on the training set being basically zero and the validation loss
slightly increasing.
Figure 11: The audio classifier trained for 250 epochs showing signs of over-
fitting.
To overcome this the classifier is retrained from scratch with 120

epochs as shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12: The audio classifier trained for 120 epochs.
Since the audio worker is essentially only a classifier and not a

detector and classifier, like the YOLOv2-networks, it is trained with
an additional class, as shown in Table 1, consisting of general back-
ground sounds. These are recorded outdoors in the typical deploy-
ment environment of the system, and also include some clips of the
sounds from the servos moving the pan/tilt platform. Like the other
workers, the output is a class label together with a confidence score.
A graphical presentation of the audio input and extracted features

is also available as shown in Figure 13, but this is not included in the
final GUI-layout.
Figure 13: Two examples of audio worker plots with output classification la-
bels, and below that the audio input amplitudes and the extracted
MFCC-features.
2.4 software 33
2.4.1.6 ADS-B worker
As mentioned above, not all aircraft will send out their vehicle cate-
gory as part of the ADS-B squitter message. Looking at how to imple-
ment the decoding of the ADS-B message, two alternative solutions
arise. The first is to use the Dump1090-software [53] and then im-
port the information into Matlab and have the worker just sorting the
data to suit the main script. The other alternative is to implement the
ADS-B decoding in Matlab using functions from the Communications
toolbox.
The difference between the two solutions is that Dump1090 takes

less computational resources, but even if the vehicle category field
of the ADS-B squitter is filled, it is not available in the output JSON-
format1 message. The Matlab implementation, on the other hand, out-
puts all available information about the aircraft albeit using more pro-
cessor power and hence slowing down the overall performance of the
system.
To assess the best solution, data were recorded to investigate the

fraction of aircraft sending out the vehicle class information. A script
was set up as part of the support software to gather some statistical
basis, and from this, it turned out that 328 aircraft out of 652, i.e. just
over half sent out their vehicle category information. For the rest of
these aircraft, the vehicle category was set to "NoData".
As mentioned in Section 1.2, a key principle of this thesis is to, by

all possible means, detect and keep track of other flying objects that
are likely to be mistaken for a drone, and the fact that about half of
the aircraft sends out their vehicle category, the ADS-B decoding is
implemented completely in Matlab despite the computational strain
drawback.
All vehicle categories that can be seen as subclasses to the air-

plane target label are clustered together. These are all the classes
"Light", "Medium", "Heavy", "HighVortex", "VeryHeavy" and "High-
PerformanceHighSpeed". The class "Rotocraft" is translated into heli-
copter. Interestingly, there is also a "UAV" category label. This is also
implemented in the ADS-B worker, although the label is translated
into drone.
One might wonder if there are any such aircraft sending out that
they belong to the UAV vehicle category. Examples are in fact found
looking at the Flightradar24 service [54]. Here we can find one such
drone as shown in Figure 14 flying at Gothenburg City Airport, one
1 JavaScript Object Notation

of the locations used when collecting the dataset of this thesis. The
drone is operated by the company Everdrone AB [55], involved in the
automated external defibrillators delivery trails of [1].
Figure 14: A drone flying at Gothenburg City Airport. From [54].
Another example seen in Figure 15 is the UK Coastguard/Border

Force surveillance drone that is regularly flying at night over the
straight of Dover since December of 2019. This is naturally a large
drone with a wingspan of 7.3 m [56].
2.4 software 35
Figure 15: Surveillance drone over the straight of Dover. From [54].
In the output message of the ADS-B worker the confidence of the

classification is set to 1 if the vehicle category message has been re-
ceived, and if not, the label is set to airplane, since this is the most
common aircraft type, with the confidence to 0.75 so that there is a
possibility for any of the other sensors to influence the final classifica-
tion.
2.4.2 Support software
The support software consists of a set of scripts to produce the train-

ing data sets, to set up the YOLOv2 network, and to do initial training
of it. There are also scripts that import an already-trained network to
perform additional training. Some of the tasks handled by the sup-
port software scripts are:
• Collection of ADS-B statistics

• Audio and video recordings and transformations
• Composition of the training datasets from the available data
• Estimation of the number and sizes of the anchor boxes for the
setup of the YOLOv2 detectors
• Training and evaluation of the detectors and classifier
The Matlab video labelling app can also be considered to be a part

of the support software, together with the Maestro Control Center
[57] used to configure the servo controller, and the K-MD2-Radar
Control Panel.
2.5 graphical user interface
The graphical user interface (GUI) is a part of the main script, but any-
way described separately. The GUI presents the results from the dif-
ferent sensors/workers and also provides possibilities for the user to
easily control the system without having to stop the code and chang-
ing it manually to get the desired configuration. The principal layout
of the GUI is shown in Figure 16.
Figure 16: The GUI layout.
The gap under the results panel is intentional, making the Matlab
command window visible at all times, so that messages, for example
exceptions, can be monitored during the development and use of the
system.
The ADS-B presentation area, shown in Figure 17, consists of a PPI-

type1 display and an altitude display. Besides presenting the ADS-B
targets, the PPI display is also used to present system information.
The solid green line is the main direction of the system relative to
the north. The other green lines present the field of motion of the
pan/tilt platform (dashed) and the field of view of the fisheye lens
camera (dotted).
1 Plan Position Indicator

2.5 graphical user interface 37
The actual direction of the pan/tilt platform is presented with a

solid red line and the field of view of the IR- and video cameras are
represented using dashed red lines. If any object is tracked by the
fisheye lens camera worker its direction is indicated by a solid cyan
line.
ADS-B targets are presented using the class label colours, as seen
in Figure 17, together with the track history plots. The presentation
of the altitude information is done in a logarithmic plot so that the
lower altitude portion is more prominent.
Figure 17: ADS-B presentation area. The circles of the PPI are 10 km apart.
Following the general GUI layout from Figure 16, the area directly
below the ADS-B presentation is the control panel, as shown in Fig-
ure 18. Starting from the top left corner, we have radiobuttons1 for
the range settings of the ADS-B PPI and altitude presentations. Next
is the number of ADS-B targets currently received and below that the
set orientation angle relative to the north of the system. The Close
GUI button is used to shut down the main script and the workers.
Figure 18: The control panel.
The GPS-position presentation changes colour to green when a

valid position has been received from the GPS-receiver, after press-
ing the Get GPS-pos button. A press on the Set ori-angle opens an
input dialogue box, so that the orientation angle of the system can be
entered. Below that are buttons for switching the detectors between
running and idle mode and the choice to display the normal Fcam
image or the moving object mask, as shown in Figure 10.
The servo settings can be controlled with buttons in the mid col-
umn of Figure 18. To complement the Fcam in finding interesting
object the pan/tilt can be set to move in two different search patterns.
One where the search is done from side to side using a static elevation
of 10◦ , so that the area from the horizon up to 20◦ is covered, and one
where the search is done with two elevation angles to increase the
coverage.
The pan/tilt platform can also be controlled by the elevation and

azimuth angles from one of the workers. This is set by the assign-
buttons, placed in priority order from the top and down. The IR&V
assign setting means that a target has to be detected by both of the
workers, and if so, the pan/tilt platform is controlled by the angular
values from the IRcam worker.
1 In Matlab only one radiobutton in a radiobutton-group can be selected at once.

2.5 graphical user interface 39
The rightmost column of Figure 18 is status information regarding

the performance in FPS of the workers, and the elevation and azimuth
angles of the Fcam worker target if such target exists. The status dis-
plays are red if the worker is not connected, yellow of the detector is
idle, and green if it is running.
The results panel features settings for the sensor fusion and presents
the workers and system results to the user. The servo controller col-
umn seen in Figure 19 indicates the source of information currently
controlling the servos of the pan/tilt platform.
Figure 19: The results panel. Here a bird is detected and tracked by the
IRcam worker.
In the lower-left corner of Figure 19, the angles of the servos are
presented. The settings for the sensor fusion and the detection results
presentation are found in the middle of the panel, as described in
Section 2.4.1.1. The information in the right part of the panel is the
current time and the position of the system. The system elevation and
azimuth relative to the north are also presented here. Note the differ-
ence in azimuth angle compared to the lower-left corner where the
system internal angle of the pan/tilt platform is presented.
The last part of Figure 19 presents offset angles for the ADS-B tar-
get, if one is present at the moment in the field of view of the IR-
and video cameras. These values are used to detect systematic errors
in the orientation of the system. The sloping distance to the ADS-B
target is also presented here. See the bottom part of Figure 8 for an
example of this.
Figure 20 shows the whole GUI, including the video displays. The
image is turned 90◦ to use the space of the document better.
methods and materials
Figure 20: The graphical user interface. Here the IRcam, Vcam and audio workers all detect and classify the drone correctly. The Fcam worker is also
tracking the drone, and the pan/tilt platform is for the moment controlled by the IRcam worker. The performance of the workers, in terms
40
of frames per second, can also be seen in the status information.

2.6 dataset for training and evaluation 41
2.6 dataset for training and evaluation
The videos in the dataset are recorded at locations in and around

Halmstad and Falkenberg, at Halmstad Airport (HAD1 /ESMT2 ), Gothen-
burg City Airport (GSE/ESGP) and Malmö Airport (MMX/ESMS).
Three different drones are used to collect and compose the dataset.
These are of the following types: Hubsan H107D+, a small-sized first-
person-view (FPV) drone, the high-performance DJI Phantom 4 Pro,
and finally, the medium-sized kit drone DJI Flame Wheel. This can
be built both as a quadcopter (F450) or in a hexacopter configuration
(F550). The version used in this thesis is an F450 quadcopter. All three
types can be seen in Figure 21.
(a) Hubsan H107D+ (b) DJI Phantom 4 Pro (c) DJI Flame Wheel F450
Figure 21: The three drone types of the dataset.
These drones differ a bit in size, with Hubsan H107D+ being the
smallest having a side length from motor-to-motor of 0.1 m. The Phan-
tom 4 Pro and the DJI Flame Wheel F450 are a bit larger with 0.3 and
0.4 m motor-to-motor side length, respectively.
The drone flights during the data collection and system evalua-
tion are all done in compliance with the national rules for unmanned
aircraft found in [58]. The most important points applicable to the
drones and locations used in this thesis are:
• When flown, the unmanned aircraft shall be within its opera-
tional range and well within the pilot’s visual line of sight
• When flown in uncontrolled airspace, the drone must stay be-
low 120 m from the ground
• When flying within airports’ control zones or traffic information
zones and if you do not fly closer than 5 km from any section
of the airport’s runway(s), you may fly without clearance if you
stay below 50 m from the ground
1 The airport code as defined by the International Air Transport Association (IATA)
2 The airport code as defined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
• For the protection of people, animals and property which are

unrelated to the flight, there must be a horizontal safety dis-
tance between these and the unmanned aircraft throughout the
flight
Since the drones must be flown within visual range, the dataset
is recorded in daylight, even if the system designed in the thesis, to
some extent can be effective even in complete darkness using the ther-
mal infrared and acoustic sensors. The ADS-B information received
is naturally also working as usual at night.
The weather in the dataset stretches from clear and sunny, to scat-
tered clouds and completely overcast, as shown in Figure 22.
Figure 22: Examples of varying weather conditions in the dataset.
Common birds in the dataset are the rook (Corvus frugilegus), as

shown in Figure 23, and the western jackdaw (Coloeus monedula) of
the crow family (Corvidae), the european herring gull (Larus argenta-
tus), the common gull (Larus canus) and the black-headed gull (Chroic-
ocephalus ridibundus) of the Laridae family of seabirds. Occasionally oc-
curring in the dataset are also the black kite (Milvus migrans) of the Ac-
cipitridae family and the eurasian skylark (Alauda arvensis) of the lark
family (Alaudidae). On average these species have a wingspan of 0.8
m, making them about twice the size of the medium-sized consumer-
grade drone.
Figure 23: A rook detected and classified correctly.
The audio in the dataset is taken from the videos or recorded sepa-
rately using one of the support software scripts.
Both the videos and the audio-files are cut into ten-second clips to
be easier to annotate. To get a more comprehensive dataset, both in
terms of aircraft types and sensor-to-target distances, it has also been
completed with non-copyrighted material from the YouTube channel
"Virtual Airfield operated by SK678387" [59]. This is in total 11 plus
38 video clips in the airplane and helicopter categories, respectively.
Since one of the objectives of this thesis is to explore performance

as a function of the sensor-to-target distance, the dataset has also
been divided into the distance category bins: Close, Medium and
Distant. The borders between these bins are chosen to follow the
industry-standard Detect, Recognize and Identify (DRI) requirements
[60], building on the Johnson criteria [61], as shown in Figure 24.
Figure 24: The DRI-requirements. From [60].
The Close distance bin is from 0 m out to a distance where the

target is 15 pixels wide in the IRcam image, i.e. the requirement for
recognition according to DRI. The Medium bin stretches from where
the target is from 15, and down to 5 pixels, hence around the DRI de-
tection point, and the Distant bin is beyond that. Given the resolution
and field of view of the IRcam and the object class sizes: Drone 0.4
m, bird 0.8 m, helicopter1 10 m and airplane2 20 m, we get a distance
division for the different object types summarized in Table 3.
Table 3: The distance bin division for the different target classes.
Bin Class
AIRPLANE BIRD DRONE HELICOPTER
Close < 1000 m < 40 m < 20 m < 500 m

Medium 1000-3000 m 40-120 m 20-60 m 500-1500 m
Distant > 3000 m > 120 m > 60 m > 1500 m
To illustrate the detect, recognize and identify concept, objects from

all the target classes being 15 pixels i width are shown in Figure 25.
1 Bell 429, one of the helicopter types in the dataset, has a length of 12.7 m
2 Saab 340 has a length of 19.7 m and a wingspan of 21.4 m
(a) An airplane at a distance of 1000 m (b) A bird at a distance of 40 m
(c) A drone at at distance of 20 m (d) A helicopter at a distance of 500 m
Figure 25: Objects on the limit between the close and medium distance bins.
At this level, we can not only detect but also recognize the differ-
ent objects, albeit without necessarily identifying them, i.e. explicitly
telling what kind of helicopter it is an so on.
Note that exactly the same distances used in this division, are also
implemented for the video data. This notwithstanding the fact that
the input layer of the Vcam worker YOLOv2 detector has a resolu-
tion 1.6 times that of the IRcam ditto as described in Section 2.4.1.2
and Section 2.4.1.3.
The annotation of the video dataset is done using the Matlab video
labeller app. An example from a labelling session is shown in Fig-
ure 26.
Figure 26: The Matlab video labeller app.
From the dataset, 120 clips (5 from each class and target bin) were
put aside to form the evaluation dataset. Out of the remaining videos
240 were then picked as evenly distributed as possible to create the
training set.
R E S U LT S
3
Recall that the scope of this thesis work was twofold: First, to ex-
plore the possibilities and limitations of designing and constructing
a multi-sensor drone detection system while building on state-of-the-
art methods and techniques. Secondly, to collect, compose and pub-
lish a drone detection dataset.
In what follows the results of the thesis are outlined, initially with
the performance of the drone detection system, on both sensor and
system levels, and finally, the dataset and its content is presented.
The evaluation of the system performance has been the hardest

thing to do, both in terms of finding other work to compare with, but
also since not all of the scenarios that the system should be able to
handle are practically feasible to evaluate. For example, testing the
drone detection capability of the system at a busy airport would not
only be breaking the rules and regulation for drone flights but could
also put people and property at risk.
First, the evaluation is done on detector level, this means measuring

the performance in terms of precision1 , recall2 and F1-score3 , of the
individual sensor on a single image or audio signal. Secondly, the
evaluation is done on system-level, i.e. the total output of the system
after the sensor fusion part. Such results are sparse, but can be found
in [40] and [14].
3.1 performance of the individual sensors
To evaluate the individual sensors, a part of the dataset was put aside
at an early stage and hence kept out of the training process. The eval-
uation set for the audio classifier contains five 10-second clips from
each output category. Since the classifier processes a one-second in-
put buffer, the evaluation set is also cut into that length, and using an
overlap of 0.5, there are a total of 297 clips in the evaluation set, 99
from each class.
tp
1 How many of the selected items are relevant? Precision = tp+fp
tp
2 How many of the relevant items are selected? Recall = tp+fn
3 The F1-score is defined to be the harmonic mean of the precision and recall, hence
precision·recall
F1 = 2 · precision+recall
47
48 results
For the audio classifier, the performance is presented using a con-

fusion matrix. The precision, recall and F1-score of the classifier are
also calculated, so that this can be compared to related results.
For the detectors of the IRcam and Vcam workers, not only the
classification label but also the placement of the bounding box must
be taken under consideration. In this the IoU, as defined in Sec-
tion 2.4.1.2, is used once more. The use similar IoU-requirements fa-
cilitates the results to be compared, and looking at the related work,
we see that an IoU of 0.5 is used in [15], [18] and [19]. A lower IoU of
0.2 is used in [43].
The evaluation set is composed of five representative videos from

each class and distance bin. Since the videos are not all precisely
ten seconds1 , the total number of images in each evaluation set is as
presented in Table 4.
Table 4: The number of images in the evaluation dataset.
Sensor Distance bin Total
Close Medium Distant
IR 6256 6226 6209 18691

Visible 6256 6254 6263 18773
The performances of the video detectors are both evaluated using

the bboxPrecisionRecall-function to get the precision, recall and F1-
score. Since we also have a confidence score of each detection the
evaluateDetectionPrecision can be utilized to get plotted curves of
precision as a function of the recall value, i.e. the PR-curve.
An important thing to keep in mind is that the ground truth is

made by a person and will contain both errors and inconsistency re-
garding the placements and sizes of the bounding boxes.
3.1.1 Thermal infrared detector and classifier
Results regarding the use of an IR-sensor can be found in [11]. How-

ever, the sensor used in that article to detect drones, up to a distance
of 100 m, has a resolution of just 80x60 pixels, and the system does
not involve any form of machine learning feature. In that paper, three
different drones were used, and a DJI Phantom 4 was detected by the
setup up to a distance of 51 m.
1 10.4 seconds on average

3.1 performance of the individual sensors 49
In [12], curves for the precision and recall of a machine learning

based thermal detector are presented. It is stated that the video clips
used for training and evaluation have a frame resolution of 1920x1080.
Unfortunately, the paper fails to mention if this is also the resolution
of the sensor. Neither is the input size if the detection network spec-
ified in detail, other than that the images are rescaled so that the
shorter side has 600 pixels.
The most substantial results to relate to in [12], is that since the

system also contains a video camera with the same image size as the
thermal one, the authors can conclude that the thermal drone detec-
tor has a performance over 8% better than the video detector.
Using the distance bin division described in Section 2.6 the pre-
cision and recall of the IRcam worker detector, with a confidence
threshold set to 0.5 and an IoU-requirement of 0.5, are shown in Ta-
ble 5, Table 6 and Table 7 below. This thesis conforms to the use of an
IoU-requirement of 0.5.
Table 5: Precision and recall of the IRcam worker detector for the distance
bin Close.
Class Average
Precision 0.9197 0.7591 0.9159 0.9993 0.8985

Recall 0.8736 0.8508 0.8790 0.8792 0.8706
bin Medium.
Class Average
Precision 0.8281 0.5063 0.8951 0.9554 0.7962

Recall 0.7039 0.7033 0.8034 0.8355 0.7615
50 results
bin Distant.
Class Average
Precision 0.7822 0.6161 0.8278 0.7982 0.7561

Recall 0.4043 0.7431 0.4836 0.4564 0.5218
Taking the average result from each of these distance bins and cal-
culate their receptive F1-scores, we obtain Table 8.
Table 8: F1-scores for the IRcam worker detector
Distance bin Average
F1-score 0.8844 0.7785 0.6175 0.7601
We can observe that the precision and recall values are well bal-
anced using a detection threshold of 0.5, and altering the setting con-
firms that a higher threshold leads to higher precision, at the cost
of a lower recall value, as shown in Table 9. The drop in recall with
increasing sensor-to-target distance is also prominent.
Table 9: Precision and recall values of the IRcam worker detector, averaged
over all classes, using a detection threshold of 0.8 instead of 0.5.
Precision 0.9985 0.9981 1.0000 0.9987

Recall 0.2233 0.1120 0.0019 0.1124
To further explore the detection threshold setting, we can run the

evaluation with values from 0.1 up to 1.0, in steps of 0.1. This is shown
in Figure 27.
Figure 27: The F1-score of the IRcam worker detector as a function of de-
tection threshold, using all the 18691 images in the evaluation
dataset.
Using not only the bounding boxes and class labels, but also the
confidence scores, the detector can be evaluated using the Matlab
evaluateDetectionPrecision-function. From this, we obtain plots of
the PR-curves1 , as shown below in Figure 28.
Note that the average precision results output from the Matlab
evaluateDetectionPrecision-function is defined to be the area un-
der the PR-curve, and hence it is not the same as the actual aver-
age precision values of the detector on the evaluation dataset, as pre-
sented in Table 5, Table 6 and Table 7 above.
To distinct that we mean the area under the PR-curve we denote

this as the AP, just as in the original YOLO paper [49]. This is also
the definition used in [18], and to further adopt the notation of these
papers we denote the mean AP taken over all classes as the mAP.
1 The precision of the detector plotted as a function of the recall value

52 results
Figure 28: Precision and recall curves for the IRcam worker detector. The
achieved values with a detection threshold of 0.5 are marked by
stars.
The choice of the detection threshold will affect the achieved pre-
cision and recall values. By plotting the values from Table 5, Table 6
and Table 7 as stars in Figure 28, we can conclude that a threshold
of 0.5 results in a balanced precision-recall combination near the top
right edge of the respective curves. Compare this to the precision and
recall values we obtain when using a detection threshold of 0.8, as
shown in Table 9 above.
Calculating the mAP for the IRcam worker we obtain Table 10.
Table 10: The mean values, over all classes, of the area under the PR-curve
(mAP) of the IRcam worker detector for the different distance bins
including the average of these values.
mAP 0.8704 0.7150 0.5086 0.7097
The results presented above will be compared to the results of the

video detector in what follows below.
From observations of the behaviour when running the drone de-

tection system, we can also point out that a common source of false
alarms of the IRcam worker detector are small clouds and edges of
large clouds lit up by the sun. An example of this can be seen in
Figure 29.
Figure 29: A false target of the IRcam worker detector caused by a small
cloud lit by the sun.
3.1.2 Video detector and classifier
To be able to compare the results of the IRcam worker to the perfor-

mance of the Vcam worker detector the same methods and settings
as above are used to get Table 11, Table 12, Table 13 and Table 14.
54 results
Table 11: Precision and recall of the Vcam worker detector for the distance
bin Close.
Class Average
Precision 0.8989 0.8284 0.8283 0.9225 0.8695

Recall 0.7355 0.7949 0.9536 0.9832 0.8668
bin Medium.
Class Average
Precision 0.8391 0.7186 0.7710 0.9680 0.8242

Recall 0.7306 0.7830 0.7987 0.7526 0.7662
bin Distant.
Class Average
Precision 0.7726 0.6479 0.8378 0.6631 0.7303

Recall 0.7785 0.7841 0.5519 0.5171 0.6579
Table 14: F1-scores for the Vcam worker detector.
F1-score 0.8682 0.7942 0.6922 0.7849
These results differ no more than 3% from the results of the IRcam
worker detector. Recall that the input layers of the YOLOv2-detectors
are different and hence that the resolution of the Vcam worker1 is
1.625 higher than that of the IRcam worker2 . So even with a lower res-
olution, and the fact that the image is in greyscale and not in colour,
the IR sensor performs as well as the visible one. This conforms well
1 416x416 pixels
2 256x256 pixels
with the conclusions in [12], where the IR detector outperforms the

visible when the image sizes are the same.
Comparing the results to other papers we see that the YOLOv2-

detector in [15] achieves an F1-score of 0.728 with exactly the same
detection threshold and IoU-requirement. This F1-score is just below
the results of the IRcam and Vcam workers.
However, one notable difference lies in that the detector in [15] has
only one output class. This fact could confirm the doctrine of this the-
sis, i.e. that the detectors should also be trained in recognizing object
easily confused for being drones. Unfortunately, there is no notation
of the sensor-to-target distance other than that "75% of the drones have
widths smaller than 100 pixels". Since the authors implement an origi-
nal YOLOv2 model from darknet, it is assumed that the input size of
the detector is 416x416 pixels.
Just as for the IRcam, as shown in Figure 27, we can also explore the
effects of the detection threshold setting. This can be seen in Figure 30
below.
Figure 30: The F1-score of the Vcam worker detector as a function of de-
tection threshold, using all the 18773 images in the evaluation
dataset.
The PR-curves of the Vcam worker detector for the different target
classes and distance bins are shown in Figure 31.
56 results
Figure 31: Precision and recall curves for the Vcam worker detector. The
achieved values with a detection threshold of 0.5 are marked by
stars.
Calculating the mAP for the Vcam worker from the results above
we obtain Table 15.
Table 15: The mean values, taken over all classes, of the area under the PR-
curve (mAP) of the Vcam worker detector for the different distance
bins including the average of these values.
mAP 0.8474 0.7477 0.5883 0.7261
Once again, this is not far from the 0.7097 mAP of the IRcam worker
detector. The result is also close to what is presented in [18] where a
mAP of 0.66 achieved, albeit using a detector with drones as the only
output class and giving no information about the sensor-to-target dis-
tances.
A YOLOv2-architecture with an input size of 480x480 pixels is im-

plemented in [19]. Moreover, the detector has two output classes,
birds and drones. Based on the presented PR-curve, the authors state
that they "can understand from the curve that precision and recall can be
achieved to be approximately 0.9 at the same time".
The performances of the IRcam and Vcam detectors together with

the reported comparable results are summarized in Table 16. Addi-
tionally, the table shows the output classes used. [44] presents the
results of the four teams participating in the 2019 Drone-vs-Bird de-
tection challenge, so from that the results of the winning team [62] is
also included in the Table 16. The approach of [62] is to first use a U-
net to perform a two-class semantic segmentation that differentiates
flying targets from the background. Then a Resnetv2 is implemented
to classify flying targets as birds or drones.
Table 16: Results from the related work and the IRcam and Vcam worker
detectors.
Source/Detector Results Classes1
Precision Recall F1-score mAP
Park et al. 2017 [15] 0.73 D

Liu et al. 2018 [17] 0.99 0.802 A, D, H
Saqib et al. 2017 [18] 0.66 D
Aker and Kalkan. 2017 [19] ≈ 0.9 ≈ 0.9 B, D
Craye and Ardjoune. 2019 [62] 0.73 B, D
IRcam worker detector 0.82 0.72 0.76 0.71 A, B, D, H
Vcam worker detector 0.81 0.76 0.78 0.73 A, B, D, H
Notably, when inspecting the PR-curves in Figure 31, the Vcam

worker detector performs outstandingly when it comes to distant air-
planes. This has its explanation in that such targets often presents a
very large signature consisting not only of the airplane itself but also
contrails behind it. An example of this, from a system evaluation ses-
sion, is seen in Figure 32. In this screenshot, an airplane is detected
and classified at a sloping distance of more than 35000 m. At this dis-
tance even a large commercial airplane is only about 1.4 pixels, and
hence well below the detection limit of the DRI-criteria.
1 Shortened to fit the table. A = Airplane, B = Bird, D = Drone and H = Helicopter

2 This is denoted as accuracy in the paper, but from the context and description it is
assumed that it is actually the recall that is reported. The result in the table is the
average of the following class results: Airplane 0.9603, Drone 0.5213 and Helicopter
0.9047
results
Figure 32: An airplane detected and classified correctly by the Vcam worker at a sloping distance of more than 35000 m. The reason behind the fact
that the ADS-B FoV-target distance display is empty is that the main script will not present that information until the target is within 30000
m horizontal distance. This limit is set base on the assumption that no target beyond 30000 m should be detectable. An assumption that
58
clearly turned out to be wrong.

The most frequent problem of the video part, when running the
drone detector system outside, is the autofocus feature of the video
camera. Unlike the Fcam and IRcam, clear skies are not the ideal
weather, but rater a scenery with some objects that can help the cam-
era to set the focus correctly. However, note that this fact is not af-
fecting the evaluation results of the Vcam worker detector perfor-
mance, as presented above, since only videos where the objects are
seen clearly and hence are possible to annotate are used.
Figure 33 shows an example of when the focus is set wrongly, so

that only the IRcam worker detects the drone.
Figure 33: The drone detected only by the IRcam since the autofocus of the
video camera is set wrongly.
A more subjective way to evaluate the performance of the Vcam

worker detector in particular, is to observe the behaviour when run-
ning it as a stand-alone application on a randomly chosen aircraft
video taken from the Internet. This procedure provides a form of as-
sessment of the detector, without all the tedious work of annotating
the video first. Four screenshots from such a session are shown in
Figure 34.
60 results
Figure 34: Airplanes, a helicopter and birds detected when running the
Vcam worker detector as a stand-alone application on an aircraft
video from [59]. Note the FPS-performance.
The most striking observation is that the detector is surprisingly

good at detecting birds not visible in the video at first glance. When
used as a stand-alone application, the detector shows not only the
object with the highest confidence score but all objects that exceed the
detection threshold. Additionally, note the higher FPS-performance
(16 FPS), with just one detector running on the computer, compared
to Figure 33 (7 FPS) when running the whole system.
3.1.3 Fisheye lens camera motion detector
The fisheye lens camera is included in the system to be able to cover

a larger airspace volume than covered by just the field of view of the
IRcam and Vcam. However, the drone detection system is not totally
reliant on the Fcam worker to detect objects of interest, since the sys-
tem also include the search programs moving the pan/tilt platform
when no other targets are detected. The search programs can easily
be turned on or off using the control panel of the GUI.
It was initially observed that the foreground/background-based

motion detector of the Fcam worker was sensitive to objects moving
with the wind as shown in Figure 35
Figure 35: False targets in the Fcam image.
The number of false targets has been mitigated by extensive tuning

of the image processing operations, the foreground detector, the blob
analysis settings and the parameters of the multi-object Kalman filter
tracker, from [51]. Some of the most critical points in this was first
to remove the imclose- and imfill-functions that was initially imple-
mented after the imopen-function in the image processing operations.
Furthermore, the minimum background ratio setting1 of the fore-

ground detector was increased together with the learning rate, so
that the GMM more quickly adapts to changing conditions. In the
blob analysis settings the minimum blob area was reduced, so that
smaller objects are detectable and a maximum blob area was also im-
plemented.
Tuning the parameters of the Kalman filter multi-object tracker was

also important. These were altered to make the tracker slower to start
new tracks and quicker to terminate them if no moving objects were
present at the predicted positions.
As mentioned in Section 2.4.1.4 an extra mask was also introduced

to eliminate noise from parts of the square-shaped image sensor that
lie outside the circular area seen by the fisheye lens.
With a resolution of 1024x768 pixels, out of which 1024x384 are

used as described in Section 2.4.1.4, the Fcam worker moving object
detector and tracker has been found, during the evaluation sessions,
to be an effective way to assign objects to the pan/tilt platform up to
a distance of 50 m against drones. Beyond this distance, the drone is
1 This is threshold to control what pixels are to be considered as part of the foreground
or the background
62 results
also theoretically so small, measured in pixels, so that it is deleted by

the imopen-function.
The maximum resolution of the Fcam is 3264x2448, so a greater

detection range should theoretically be achievable. However, using a
higher resolution is also more demanding in terms of computational
resources, leading to a reduction in the FPS-performance, not only
for the Fcam worker, but also for the other workers. Since the fisheye
lens camera is also complemented by the search program, the choice
has been made to settle with this resolution and the limited detection
range that follows from this.
Figure 36 shows a drone tracked by the Fcam worker. At this mo-

ment the pan/tilt platform is controlled by the output of the Fcam
worker. Just a moment later, as seen in Figure 37, the drone is de-
tected by the IRcam and Vcam workers, and the pan/tilt platform is
therefore controlled by the IRcam worker output.
Figure 36: A drone tracked by the Fcam worker.

Figure 37: The results panel just after Figure 36. Note the time stamp.
3.1.4 Acoustic classifier
Using the 297 clips of the evaluation audio dataset and the Matlab
confusionchart-function we obtain the confusion matrix shown in
Figure 38.
Figure 38: Confusion matrix from the evaluation of the audio classifier
So from this, we can put together Table 17 with the precision and
recall results for the different classes and can thereby also calculate
the average over all classes.
64 results
Table 17: Precision and recall from the evaluation of the audio classifier.
Class Average
DRONE HELICOPTER BACKGROUND
Precision 0.9694 0.8482 0.9885 0.9354

Recall 0.9596 0.9596 0.8687 0.9293
This gives a F1-score of 0.9323, which is higher compared to [26].

The classifier in that paper also utilize MFCC-features, and out of the
three network model types tested, the one comprising a LSTM-RNN1
performs the best with a F1-score of 0.6984. The classification prob-
lem in that paper is binary (drone or background).
Another paper utilizing MFCC-features is [27]. Using a Support

Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, the authors report a precision of
0.983. Five output classes are used (drone, nature daytime, crowd,
train passing and street with traffic), and the classification is based
on a one-against-one strategy, hence ten binary SVM classifiers are
implemented. The final output label is then computed using the max-
wins voting principle. The results are summarized in Table 18.
Table 18: Results from the related work and the audio worker classifier.
Source/Detector Results Classes2
Precision Recall F1-score
Kim et al. 2017 [21]3 0.88 0.83 0.85 D, BG

Jeon et al. 2017 [26] 0.55 0.96 0.70 D, BG
Bernardi et al. 2017 [27] 0.98 D, BG4
Audio worker classifier 0.94 0.93 0.93 D, H, BG
Against a drone, the practical range of the acoustic sensor is 35-45

m, depending on how the drone is flying. This is in parity with the
50 m of [23], but far from the 160 m against a F450 drone reported in
[28] with its much more complex microphone configuration5 .
The classification range of the system against helicopters has not

been tested practically.
1 Recurrent Neural Network

2 Shortened to fit the table. D = Drone, H = Helicopter, BG = Background
3 The results are calculated from the presented confusion matrix
4 Four background classes are defined: Nature daytime, crowd, train passing and
street with traffic
5 A 120 element microphone array
3.1.5 RADAR module
From the datasheet of the K-MD2 [47], we have that it can detect a
person with a Radar Cross Section (RCS) of 1 m2 up to a distance
of 100 m. Since we have from [29] that the RCS of the F450 drone is
0.02 m2 , it is straight forward to calculate that, theoretically, the F450
should be possible to detect up to a distance of
r
4 0.02
· 100 = 37.6m.
1
Furthermore, given that the micro-doppler echoes from the rotors
are 20 dB below that of the drone body, these should be detectable up
to a distance of
r
4 0.02
· 100 = 11.9m.
1 · 100
Practically the F450 drone is detected and tracked by the K-MD2
up to a maximum distance of 24 m, as shown in Figure 39. This is
however the maximum recorded distance, and it is observed that the
drone is generally detected up to a distance of 18 m.
Figure 39: The maximum recorded detection distance of the K-MD 2 radar
module against the F450 drone
66 results
The micro-doppler signature can also be detected at short distances,

as shown in Figure 40. Corresponding range-doppler plots showing
the micro-doppler of flying drones can be found in [34] and [35].
Figure 40: The micro-doppler signature the F450 drone
Compared to the echo of a person walking in front of the radar, as

we can see in Figure 41, no such micro-doppler signature is present
in that case.
Figure 41: The echo of a person walking in front of the radar module
Due to the short practical detection range of the radar module, it is

not included in the drone detection system of this thesis.
3.2 sensor fusion and system performance 67
3.2 sensor fusion and system performance
The choice of early or late sensor fusion has also been investigated.
By early sensor fusion, we here mean to fuse the images from the IR-
and video cameras before processing them in a detector and classi-
fier. Late sensor fusion will, in this case, be to combine the output
results from the separate detectors running on the IR- and video cam-
era streams, respectively.
When implementing early sensor fusion, the pixel-to-pixel match-

ing of the images turned out to be the biggest issue. Even if this
is possible to do in a static scenario as shown in Figure 42, it has
turned out not to be a feasible solution against moving objects, such
as drones, with the available equipment. This stems from the small
but still noticeable difference in latency between the two cameras.
This is the motive for the implementation of late sensor fusion in the
drone detection system of this thesis.
Figure 42: From the left: The video image, the thermal infrared camera im-
age and the fused image.
An interesting sensor fusion method is also found in [20] where the

image from the narrow-angle camera is inserted in the image from the
wide-angle camera and then processed by a single YOLO-detector. It
is a bit unclear how they avoid situations when the inserted image
obscure the object found in the wide-angle image.
As described in Section 2.4.1.1, the sensor fusion method of the

drone detection system is to utilize the class outputs and the confi-
dence scores of the included sensors, and also to smooth the result
over time (about one second). With the dynamical setting available in
the GUI it is possible to use not only the or-function, as done in [40],
but also more sophisticated variants by setting the number of sensors
included and required for detection, including the weights for them.
To implement the sensor fusion using a trained network as in [14]

would likely require much more training data, not only on individual
sensor level, but especially on a system level. Such amounts of data
68 results
have not been possible to achieve within the scope of this thesis.
To evaluate the system level has also turned out to be even harder
than expected due to the current situation. For example, all regular
flights to and from the local airport have been cancelled, and hence
the possibility for a thorough system evaluation against airplanes de-
creased drastically.
Using the material from the screen recorder1 , it is possible to do a

frame-by-frame analysis of a typical drone detection. An example of
this is found in Table 19 below.
Table 19: Table from a frame-by-frame analysis of a drone detection dur-

ing one of the evaluation sessions. The servo column indicates the
current servo controlling sensor. The next column specifies if the
Fcam motion detector is tracking the drone or not. The respective
output labels are shown in the rest of the columns. Note that the
system output is more stable and lasts for more frames than the
IRcam and Vcam individually, indicating the benefit of the sensor
fusion. Figure 20 in Section 2.5 is the third frame from 14:46:18.
Since there is no information from the ADS-B receiver in this case,
that column has been omitted from the table.
1 The screen recorder saves images at 10 FPS

As an attempt to measure the efficiency of the sensor fusion, we

can consider occasions such as the one described in Table 19, as be-
ing a detection opportunity. If we define this to be when the drone is
continuously observable in the field of view of the IRcam and Vcam,
and hence possible for the system (including the audio classifier) to
analyse and track, we can find 73 such opportunities in the screen
recordings from the evaluation sessions.
The duration of the individual detection opportunities is from just

fractions of a second up to 28 seconds. This is highly dependent on
how the drone is flying and if the system is able to track the drone or
not. We can see that Table 19 describes the frame-by-frame analysis
of a detection opportunity lasting for three seconds.
Comparing the system results after the sensor fusion1 with the out-
put from the respective sensors, we can observe that the system out-
puts a drone classification at some time in 78% of the detection op-
portunities. Closest to this is the performance of the Vcam detector
that outputs a drone classification in 67% of the opportunities.
It is also possible to look at the system behaviour without a drone

flying in front of it. This provides an opportunity to analyse the false
detections that the system outputs. Out of the videos from the evalua-
tion session, a ten minutes long section was reviewed frame-by-frame.
Table 20 shows the timestamps, sensor types, causes of the false detec-
tions, and the resulting output labels. Setting the minimum number
of sensors-option to two prevents all of the false detections in the
table from becoming false detections on a system level.
1 Having all sensors included with weight 1.0, and the minimum number of sensors
set to two
70 results
Table 20: Table of false detections appearing in a ten minutes long section of
screen recording from an evaluation session, including the type of
object causing the false detection.
The false detections caused by insects flying just in front of the sen-
sors are very short-lived. The ones caused by clouds can last longer,
sometimes several seconds. Figure 43 shows the false detections of
the IRcam at 02:34 and the Vcam at 02:58 from Table 20.
Figure 43: The false detections of the IRcam at 02:34 and the Vcam at 02:58.
As described above, the individual weaknesses observed for the

primary sensors are the sensitivity to clouds of the IRcam and the
autofocus problem of the Vcam. However, running the whole detec-
tion system has also shown that such individual shortcomings can
be overcome using a multi-sensor solution. In what follows are some
screenshots from the system evaluation sessions, and some interest-
ing observations are pointed out.
These images also show the FPS-performance. The system is able

to process 6 FPS or more from all cameras and over 10 processing
cycles for the input audio stream per second. Note that the ADS-B so-
lution chosen is the more computationally demanding out of the two
alternatives evaluated. To be able to evaluate the system performance
a screen recording software has also been running on the computer
at the same time as the system software. This setup was a necessity
since the drone flying took all the computational power of the thesis
author during the evaluation sessions.
As shown by Figure 20, in Section 2.5, when describing the graph-

ical user interface, the ideal situation is of course that all the sensors
output the correct classification of the detected target and that the
object is tracked by the Fcam. This is however far from the case at all
times.
Nevertheless, after the sensor fusion the system output class is ob-
served to be robust as shown in Figure 44 and Figure 45 where the
IRcam and Vcam classifies the drone incorrectly but still with a cor-
rect system output.
Since the output class depends on the confidence score, the result is
sometimes also the opposite, as shown in Figure 46, so that one very
confident sensor causes the system output to be wrong. If this turns
72 results
out to be frequent, the weight of the sensor can easily be adjusted, or

the sensor can be excluded completely from the system result. The
time smoothing part in the sensor fusion will also reduce the effect
of an occasional misclassification, so that the system output stays cor-
rect, as can be seen in Figure 47. Naturally, there are also times when
all sensors are wrong, as evident in Figure 48.
To the author’s knowledge the inclusion of an ADS-B receiver in a

drone detection system has not yet been described in the scientific lit-
erature, so it is also of interest to see how this information is utilized.
Recall Figure 32, in which the ADS-B information set the pan/tilt
platform in the direction of the airplane, so that it was detected by
the Vcam at a distance of more than 35000 m.
Looking at Figure 49, we can see that when the airplane comes
within 30000 m horizontal distance from the system the ADS-B infor-
mation will appear in the results panel. At this moment, the sloping
distance is 32000 m and the offset between the camera direction and
the calculated one is zero. Moreover, since the system has not yet re-
ceived the vehicle category information at this moment the target is
marked with a square in the ADS-B presentation area, and the confi-
dence score of the ADS-B result is 0.75.
The next interesting event, shown in Figure 50, is when the system
receives the vehicle category message. To indicate this, the symbol in
the ADS-B presentation is changed into a circle, and the confidence is
set to one since we are now sure that it is an airplane. At a distance
of 20800 m, it is also detected and classified correctly by the IRcam
worker, as shown in Figure 51.
Figure 44: A correct system output even if the Vcam classifies the drone as being a bird.
73
results
Figure 45: A correct system output even if the IRcam classifies the drone as being a helicopter.
74
Figure 46: The high confidence score of the audio classifier cases the system output to be incorrect just as the audio output.
75
results
Figure 47: The time smoothing part of the sensor fusion reduces the effect of an occasional misclassification even if that has a high confidence scores.
76
Figure 48: The drone is misclassified by several sensors at the same time.
77
results
Figure 49: When the airplane is within 30000 m horizontal distance the ADS-B information is presented in the results panel.
78
Figure 50: The vehicle category message has been received by the system, so the confidence for the airplane classification is set to 1. The airplane is
now at a distance of 23900m.
79
results
Figure 51: The airplane is detected by the IRcam worker at a distance of 20800 m.
80
3.3 drone detection dataset 81
3.3 drone detection dataset
Since one of the objectives of this thesis is to collect, compose and pub-
lish a multi-sensor dataset for drone detection this is also described
as part of the results chapter.
As mentioned in Section 2.4.1.5, the audio dataset consists of a total

of 90 ten-seconds clips, 30 from each class, in wav-format with a sam-
pling frequency of 44100 Hz. The clips are not annotated in any other
way than the filenames themself, e.g. DRONE_001.wav. Included in
the background category are also system-specific sounds, in this case,
the sounds of the pan/tilt platform servos and the power relay board.
The video dataset is more extensive and consists of a total of 650

video clips, out of which 365 are IR and 285 are visible video. Each of
these has a duration of about 10 seconds1 . The ambition has been to
have a proper distribution between sensors, target types and distance
bins. The distribution is presented in Table 21 and Table 22.
Table 21: The distribution of the 365 IR videos.
Bin Class
Close 9 10 24 15
Medium 25 23 94 20
Distant 40 46 39 20
Table 22: The distribution of the 285 visible videos.
Bin Class
Close 17 10 21 27
Medium 17 21 68 24
Distant 25 20 25 10
All videos are in mp4-format and comprise in total 203328 anno-

tated images. The IR videos have a resolution of 320x256 pixels and
are all recorded so that no further actions are needed before the
YOLOv2-detector, hence, all image processing operations described
in Section 2.4.1.2 are already implemented before the video is saved.
1 The average duration of the videos is 10.4 s

82 results
This is done to ensure that the objects are clearly visible when an-
notating the videos. The visible videos have a resolution of 640x512
pixels.
The filenames of the videos start with the sensor type, followed by
the target type and a serial number, e.g. IR_DRONE_001.mp4. The an-
notation of the respective clip has the additional name LABELS, e.g
IR_DRONE_001_LABELS.mat. These files are Matlab GroundTruth-
objects, and using the Matlab video labeller app, the videos and re-
spective label-file can easily be opened, inspected and even edited. If
the dataset is to be used in another development environment, the
label-files can be opened in Matlab, and the content can be copy-
pasted into Excel and saved in the desired format, for example, .csv.
Importing .mat-files into the Python-environment can also be done
using the scipy.io.loadmat-command.
To retrieve the images from the videos and form a dataset of the in-
dividual images the selectLabels- and objectDetectorTrainingData-
functions are recommended.
It has not been possible to film all types of suitable targets, so, as
mentioned in Section 2.6, some clips are taken from longer aircraft
videos downloaded from [59]. This is a total of 49 clips (11 airplane
and 38 helicopter clips) in the visible video dataset.
Since the distance bin information of the clip is not included in the
filename, there is also an associated excel-sheet where this is shown
in a table. This table also contains information about exact drone type,
and if the clip comes from the Internet or not.
The greatest sensor-to-target distance for a drone in the dataset

is 200 m. Within the dataset, there are also eight clips (five IR and
three visible videos) with two drones flying at the same time. Fig-
ure 52 shows the IRcam worker running in stand-alone mode on one
of these videos. The clip chosen is not part of the training dataset.
Note also the FPS-performance.
3.3 drone detection dataset 83
Figure 52: Two drones detected and classified correctly by the IRcam
worker.
DISCUSSION
4
An unforeseen problem occurring when designing the system was ac-
tually of mechanical nature. Even though the system uses a pan/tilt
platform with ball-bearings and very high-end titanium gear digital
servos, the platform was observed to oscillate in some situations. This
phenomena was mitigated by carefully balancing the tilt platform and
by introducing some friction in the pivot point of the pan segment. It
might also be the case that such problems could be overcome using
a servo programmer1 . Changing the internal settings2 of the servos
can also increase their maximum ranges from 90◦ to 180◦ . This would
extend the volume covered by the IRcam and Vcam, so that all targets
tracked by the Fcam could be investigated, not just a portion of them,
as now.
It is also observed, regarding the sensors, that there is a lower limit

of around 5 FPS where the system becomes so slow so that the ability
to track flying objects is lost. All actions taken by the system have to
be well balanced, and just such a simple thing as plotting the ADS-B
panel with a higher frequency than necessary can cause a drop in the
FPS-rate. Such problems can be overcome by the use of more than
one computational resource.
One thing not explored in this thesis is the use of the Fcam to-
gether with the audio classifier as a means to output the position and
label of a system detection. Implementing a YOLOv2-detector on the
Fcam could also be considered. However, a dataset for the training of
this must either be collected separately or by skewing images from
the visible video dataset, so that the distortion of the Fcam image is
matched. Neither is the performance of the audio classifiers perfor-
mance as a function of sensor-to-target distance explored in the same
way as the IR and visible sensors.
There is also a need for a better method to evaluate the whole

drone detection system. To assess the performances of the individual
sensors is pretty straight forward, and in most cases, there are also
numerous results to relate to, except for the IR-sensor, at least at the
moment. On a system level, however, the results are very sparse, mak-
ing any comparison difficult.
1 This is not the same as the servo controller

2 Also using the servo programmer
85
86 discussion
Due to the very short practical detection range, the RADAR mod-
ule was unfortunately not included in the final system setup. Having
a RADAR with a useful range would have contributed significantly
to the system results since it is the only one of the available sensors
being able to measure the distance to the target efficiently. Another
way to increase the efficiency of the system could also be to exploit
the temporal dimension better, i.e. to use the flight paths and the be-
haviour of the object to better classify them.
As we have seen, most of the false detections are caused by either

insects or clouds. Adding these classes to the dataset might be a way
to overcome this annoyance. Using three different quadcopter drones
makes the system effective against such drones. Extending the drone
dataset by including also hexacopters, octocopters, fixed-wing and
single rotor drones would be necessary before using the system in a
real world application.
It would also be of interest to implement YOLOv3 in the system,

since it is more efficient in detecting small objects according to [20],
and then compare the performance to the results reported in this the-
sis.
Where there are measures, there are also countermeasures. Looking

at the drone market today, it is easy to find equipment purposely built
to avoid detection by systems such as the one in this thesis. This can
range from just the installation to low noise propellers [63], to drones
disguised as birds, as shown in Figure 53. Testing the thesis system
against such drones would be appealing.
Figure 53: A drone from the "spy birds" programme lead by Song Bifeng,
professor at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian.
From [64].
discussion 87
Likewise, it would be interesting to test the system against a drone

equipped with a transponder to see the performance of the ADS-B
worker at a short distance. Such transponders, as exemplified in Fig-
ure 54, weighs as little as 20 grams [65]. However, the price1 of such
equipment is still an issue for the non-professional drone user.
Figure 54: The ping20Si Mode S ADS-B transponder. From [65].
Since ADS-B information is included in the system, this could also

be implemented in the form of ground truth for an online learning
feature. Images of ADS-B targets could be saved, and on regular inter-
vals, the detectors would be retrained using these additional images.
To further enlarge the training data set all images of detected objects
could be saved and annotated manually at a later stage.
The work done in this thesis is also applicable to other areas. One
such that immediately springs to mind, is road traffic surveillance.
Except for the ADS-B receiver, all other parts and scripts could be
adopted and retrained to detect and track pedestrians or just a spe-
cific vehicle type, e.g. motorcycles.
1 2790 euro as of 2020-05-10

CONCLUSIONS
5
The increased use of drones and the raising concerns of safety and
security issues following from this highlights the need for efficient
and robust drone detection systems.
This thesis explores the possibilities to design and build a multi-

sensor drone detection system utilizing state-of-the-art machine learn-
ing techniques, and sensor fusion. The performance of the individual
sensors are evaluated in terms of F1-score and mean average preci-
sion (mAP).
The results confirm that general machine learning techniques can

be applied to input data from infrared sensors making them well
suited for the drone detection task. The infrared detector achieves an
F1-score of 0.7601, showing similar performance as the visible video
detector with an F1-score of 0.7849. The audio classifier achieves an
F1-score of 0.9323.
Besides the analysis of the feasibility of an infrared sensor, this

thesis expands the number of target classes utilized in the detectors
compared to the related papers. The thesis also comprise a novel in-
vestigation of the detection performance as a function of sensor-to-
target distance, with a distance bin division derived from the Detect,
Recognize and Identify (DRI) requirements based on the Johnson cri-
teria.
The proposed sensor fusion makes the detection and classification

more robust than that of any of the sensors individually. It also shows
the efficiency of sensor fusion as a means to mitigate false detections.
To the author’s knowledge, the system is also the first to explore the
benefits of including ADS-B data to better separate targets prone to
be mistaken for drones.
Due to the lack of a publicly available dataset, the other main con-
cern of this thesis was to contribute with such a multi-sensor dataset.
This dataset is especially suited for the comparison of infrared and
visible video detectors due to the similarities in conditions and target
types in the set.
The dataset is made up of 650 video clips containing a total of

203328 annotated images, and has four target classes: Drones, birds,
89
90 conclusions
airplanes and helicopters. Furthermore, the dataset has a distance bin

division, making it possible to explore the sensor-to-target distance
performance of the detector. There is also an audio dataset with 900
seconds of acoustic data from drones, helicopters and backgrounds.
Further research could be to implement a distance estimation func-

tion based on the output from the detectors. Such research could also
include the investigation of distributed sensors and to further make
use of the temporal dimension to separate drones form other targets
based on the behaviour over time as they are tracked by the system.
This thesis also discloses the need for a benchmark or standard

when it comes to the evaluation of machine learning and sensor fu-
sion applications on a system level.
The drone detection dataset is available at:

https://github.com/DroneDetectionThesis/Drone-detection-dataset
The author of this thesis can be contacted at:
[email protected]
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MASTER THESIS

Drone Detection and Classification using Machine

Halmstad University, June 3, 2020

Fredrik Svanström: Drone Detection and Classification using Machine

This thesis explores the process of designing an automatic multi-

A video dataset containing 650 annotated infrared and visible videos

Nevertheless, such drones can also be intentionally or unintention-

Due to the rapid development of commercial and recreational drones

This thesis will explore the possibilities and limitations of design-

1.1 related work

To automatically detect flying drones, some form of sensor or sensor

Systems for drone detection utilizing one or more of the aforemen-

An introduction to the subject of drone detection is found in [10],

One of the conclusions of [10] is also that "Future research directions

According to the authors, [5] "presents a comprehensive review of cur-

One of the take-home messages is that the authors, on more than

Also published in 2019, [7] has an exhaustive 178 references. Within

This paper is directly reflected in the further extent of the thesis

1.1.1 Thermal infrared sensors

The sensor used is a low-cost FLIR Lepton 80x60 pixels thermal

ing methods to build a system that automatically detects, classifies

To detect the drones, a Faster-RCNN is implemented and since "it

Compared to the results of [12], as summarized above, this thesis

A thermal infrared camera is also used as one of the sensors in

1.1.2 Sensors in the visible range

A widespread method to detect drones, as described in recent scien-

convolutional neural network (CNN).

One of these papers, published in 2017, is [15] making an in-depth

As it turns out, when studying the subject of drone detection in im-

The success of the YOLOv2 motivates the use of it in this thesis.

The GMM foreground detector will also be implemented in this

Of the papers found using versions of the YOLO-architecture for

1 You Only Look Once in its second version

1.1.3 Acoustic sensors

Numerous papers are also exploring the possibility to detect drones

However, it is observed that the Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coeffi-

When comparing three different classification models for the drone

The maximum acoustic detection range reported in the reviewed

Since RADAR is the most common technology to detect flying objects,

The small Radar Cross Sections (RCS) of medium-sized consumer

1.1.5 Other drone detection techniques

Utilizing the RF-fingerprint is described in [36], and in [37] a CNN

The use of LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) and LADAR

1.1.6 Sensor fusion

As mentioned above, the benefits of sensor fusion are also pointed

Furthermore under the section Challenges and Open Research Is-

Without any further specifications of the sensors used besides that

1.1.7 Drone detection datasets

As mentioned above, [5] points out the lack of a publicly available

The dataset used in [20] is not publicly available due to confidential-

1.2 thesis scope

The scope of this thesis is twofold: First, to explore the possibilities

The second object of the thesis is to collect, compose and publish

Thus, this thesis can be seen as incorporating all phases of design-

A key doctrine and principle of this thesis will be that to effectively

1.2.1 Thesis system specifications and limitations

The system designed in this thesis shall:

• Utilize thermal infrared, visible video and acoustic sensors to

1 Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast