LAUSR

Abstract Real-time unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-based thermal infrared images processing, due to high spatial resolution and knowledge of the various infrared radiant energy level distribution of solid bodies, has important applications such as monitoring and control of the various phenomena in different natural situations. One of these applications is monitoring the ground vehicles in cities by using detection or semantic segmentation of them in the thermal images. In this research, our purpose is to improve the performance of deep learning combined model by using Gaussian-Bernoulli Restricted Boltzmann Machine (GB-RBM) specifications for the segmentation of the ground vehicles from UAV-based thermal infrared imagery. The proposed model is studied in three steps. First, designing the proposed model by using an encoder-decoder structure and addition of extracted features from convolutional layers and restricted Boltzmann machine in the network. Second, the implementation of the research goals on four sets of UAV-based thermal infrared imagery named NPU_CS_UAV_IR_DATA that was collected from some streets of China by using FLIR TAU2 thermal infrared sensor in 2017. Finally, analyzing the performance of the proposed model by using five state-of-the-art models in semantic segmentation. The results evaluated the performance of the proposed model as a robust model with the average precision and average processing time of approximately 0.97, and 19.73 s for all datasets, respectively.