Low-altitude small-sized object detection using lightweight feature-enhanced convolutional neural network

摘要

Unauthorized operations referred to as“black flights”of unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)pose a significant danger to public safety,and existing low-attitude object detection algorithms encounter difficulties in balancing detection precision and speed.Additionally,their accuracy is insufficient,particularly for small objects in complex environments.To solve these problems,we propose a lightweight feature-enhanced convolutional neural network able to perform detection with high precision detection for low-attitude flying objects in real time to provide guidance information to suppress black-flying UAVs.The proposed network consists of three modules.A lightweight and stable feature extraction module is used to reduce the computational load and stably extract more low-level feature,an enhanced feature processing module significantly improves the feature extraction ability of the model,and an accurate detection module integrates low-level and advanced features to improve the multiscale detection accuracy in complex environments,particularly for small objects.The proposed method achieves a detection speed of 147 frames per second(FPS)and a mean average precision(mAP)of 90.97%for a dataset composed of flying objects,indicating its potential for low-altitude object detection.Furthermore,evaluation results based on microsoft common objects in context(MS COCO)indicate that the proposed method is also applicable to object detection in general.