Vision-enabled UAV and counter-UAV technologies for surveillance and security of critical infrastructures (UAV4S), Thessaloniki, Greece

The 12^th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS) which was held in Thessaloniki, Greece, on 23-25 September 2019 hosted the workshop on Vision-enabled UAV and counter-UAV technologies for surveillance and security of critical infrastructures (UAV4S). The UAV4S workshop was organized by Dr. Dimitrios Zarpalas and Dr. Konstantinos Votis from CERTH, both members of the ALADDIN consortium, in an attempt to stimulate research activities towards current technological advances and challenges about the development of UAV vision embedded technologies for surveillance and c-UAV detection localization and identification algorithms, methods and tools, by utilizing enhanced computational vision, acoustic, radar and fusion methodologies. In addition, the objective of this workshop was to serve as an interdisciplinary forum for bringing together specialists from the scientific areas of Computer Vision, Surveillance, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Security Research, promoting the formation of a community around the topic and disseminating the ALADDIN project to an increased number of researchers and practitioners.

Patrick Garnier, the coordinator of the H2020 ALADDIN Project, was the invited speaker of the workshop, presenting the perspectives of counter-UAV technology for security of critical infrastructures. The ALADDIN coordinator also introduced the project to the audience. A total of eight scientific papers were presented in the workshop. The papers included UAV detection and classification methods for electro optro and thermal cameras as well as surveillance radar sensors. The workshop also included methods embedded on the UAV systems for UAV neutralization via interception of malicious drones, livestock monitoring through UAV images and autonomous swarm of heterogeneous robots for surveillance operations. The list of published papers follows:

• “Critical infrastructure security against drone attacks using visual analytics“, Xindi Zhang and Krishna Chandramouli
• “Classification of Drones with a Surveillance Radar Signal“, Marco Messina and Gianpaolo Pinelli
• “Minimal-time trajectories for interception of malicious drones in constrained environments“, Manuel Garcia, Antidio Viguria, Guillermo Heredia and Anibal Ollero
• “UAV classification with deep learning using surveillance radar data“, Stamatios Samaras, Vasileios Magoulianitis, Anastasios Dimou, Dimitrios Zarpalas and Petros Daras
• “UAV localization using panoramic thermal cameras“, Anthony Thomas, Vincent Leboucher, Antoine Cotinat, Pascal Finet, Mathilde Gilber
• “Multimodal Deep Learning Framework for Enhanced Accuracy of UAV Detection“, Eleni Diamantidou, Antonios Lalas, Konstantinos Votis and Dimitrios Tzovaras
• “Multi-scale Feature Fused Single Shot Detector for Small Object Detection in UAV Images“, Manzoor Razaak, Hamideh Kerdegari, Vasileios Argyriou and Paolo Remagnino
• “Autonomous swarm of heterogeneous robots for surveillance operations“, Georgios Orfanidis, Savvas Apostolidis, Athanasios Kapoutsis, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Elias Kosmatopoulos, Stefanos Vrochidis and Ioannis Kompatsiaris