Bird or Drone? The Hardest Classification Problem in Counter-UAS Isn't the One You'd Expect
A counter-drone system can have a million-dollar radar, a steerable thermal camera, and a rack of GPUs, yet still be undone by a seagull.
This is the bird vs. drone problem, and it is the most consequential unglamorous challenge in counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS). It sounds trivial. A human standing in a field can usually tell a hawk from a quadcopter in a second or two. But asked to do it automatically, from a tiny smudge of pixels half a mile away, in changing light, fast enough to act, and without crying wolf at every gull and pigeon in the sky, and the problem turns brutal. And getting it wrong in either direction is expensive in ways that decide whether a system is deployable at all.
This article is about why a bird and a drone are so hard to tell apart, the handful of physical signatures we can actually...
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