Car speed estimation method for UAV images

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exhibit an interesting operational flexibility considering that they can be used when and where it is necessary. These cutting-edge acquisition systems are able to fly very close to the ground allowing the acquisition of images in which objects are described by a very high level of detail. In this work, a method to detect moving objects and estimate their speed is presented. The method starts with the registration of two successive images belonging to a sequence acquired by means of a UAV. Then, the method proceeds with the identification of moving objects thanks to an opportune comparison of the couple of images. In the last step, to each moving object a speed estimate is assigned by exploiting the corresponding shift of spatial image coordinates. Experimental results have been conducted on a real UAV sequence of images. They show that the proposed method allows providing interesting estimation performances.