UAV aerial image target detection based on BLUR-YOLO

ABSTRACT

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing technology, target detection based on UAV images has increasingly become a hot spot for research. Aiming at the problems of many small target instances, complex backgrounds and difficult feature extraction in UAV images, we propose a UAV aerial image target detection algorithm called BLUR-YOLO. First, the h-swish activation function is used in the backbone network and the neck network to increase the expressiveness of the model. Second, an attention mechanism (CoordAttention) is added to the bottleneck layer of the backbone network, thereby increasing the weight of valid information and suppressing background noise interference. Finally, by removing redundant nodes of the path aggregation network (PANet), adding additional connections, and using BlurPool instead of the downsampling method, a feature pyramid network (Blur-PANet) is proposed to effectively fuse multilayer features. Experimental results on the VisDrone public dataset show that the proposed drone image object detection model (BLUR-YOLO) is 1.2% better than the YOLOv4 algorithm, which proves the effectiveness of the method.

KEYWORDS:

• Aerial images of drones
• object detection
• h-swish activation function
• attention mechanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.