# Through-Foliage Tracking with Airborne Optical Sectioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [An Autonomous Drone for Search and Rescue in Forests using Airborne Optical Sectioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04328/) (2021)
- [Search and Rescue with Airborne Optical Sectioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08835/) (2020)
- [A Statistical View on Synthetic Aperture Imaging for Occlusion Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06600/) (2019)
- [Fast Automatic Visibility Optimization for Thermal Synthetic Aperture Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04065/) (2020)
- [Pose Error Reduction for Focus Enhancement in Thermal Synthetic Aperture Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08606/) (2020)
- [Combined Person Classification with Airborne Optical Sectioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10077/) (2021)
- [Image Anomalies: a Review and Synthesis of Detection Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02564/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Inverse Airborne Optical Sectioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13344/) (2022)
- [Evaluation of Color Anomaly Detection in Multispectral Images For Synthetic Aperture Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04293/) (2022)
- [On the Role of Field of View for Occlusion Removal with Airborne Optical Sectioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13371/) (2022)
- [Fusion of Single and Integral Multispectral Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17515/) (2023)
- [Stereoscopic Depth Perception Through Foliage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16120/) (2023)
- [An Autonomous Drone Swarm for Detecting and Tracking Anomalies among Dense Vegetation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10754/) (2024)
- [DeepForest: Sensing Into Self-Occluding Volumes of Vegetation With Aerial Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02171/) (2025)
- [Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12572/) (2025)
- [Synthetic Aperture Sensing for Occlusion Removal with Drone Swarms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14692/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Aperture Anomaly Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13590/) (2023)
- [Reciprocal Visibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06991/) (2024)
- [De-occluding broadband metalens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19403/) (2026)
- [Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19985/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting and tracking moving targets through foliage is difficult, and for many cases even impossible in regular aerial images and videos. We present an initial light-weight and drone-operated 1D camera array that supports parallel synthetic aperture aerial imaging. Our main finding is that color anomaly detection benefits significantly from image integration when compared to conventional raw images or video frames (on average 97% vs. 42% in precision in our field experiments). We demonstrate, that these two contributions can lead to the detection and tracking of moving people through densely occluding forest.