Continuous Marine Tracking via Autonomous UAV Handoff

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12763v1
• Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:35:53 GMT
• Title: Continuous Marine Tracking via Autonomous UAV Handoff
• Abstract summary: This paper introduces an autonomous UAV vision system for continuous, real-time tracking of marine animals, specifically sharks.<n>The system integrates an onboard computer with a stabilised RGB-D camera and a custom-trained OSTrack pipeline.<n>A key innovation is the inter-UAV handoff protocol, which enables seamless transfer of tracking responsibilities between drones.
• Score: 0.4935992163749761
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: This paper introduces an autonomous UAV vision system for continuous, real-time tracking of marine animals, specifically sharks, in dynamic marine environments. The system integrates an onboard computer with a stabilised RGB-D camera and a custom-trained OSTrack pipeline, enabling visual identification under challenging lighting, occlusion, and sea-state conditions. A key innovation is the inter-UAV handoff protocol, which enables seamless transfer of tracking responsibilities between drones, extending operational coverage beyond single-drone battery limitations. Performance is evaluated on a curated shark dataset of 5,200 frames, achieving a tracking success rate of 81.9\% during real-time flight control at 100 Hz, and robustness to occlusion, illumination variation, and background clutter. We present a seamless UAV handoff framework, where target transfer is attempted via high-confidence feature matching, achieving 82.9\% target coverage. These results confirm the viability of coordinated UAV operations for extended marine tracking and lay the groundwork for scalable, autonomous monitoring.

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