Fast automatic vehicle detection in UAV images using convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Vehicle targets in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images are generally small, so a significant amount of detailed information on targets may be lost after neural computing, which leads to the poor performances of the existing recognition algorithms. Based on convolutional neural networks that utilize the YOLOv3 algorithm, this article focuses on the development of a quick automatic vehicle detection method for UAV images. First, a vehicle dataset for target recognition is constructed. Then, a novel YOLOv3 vehicle detection framework is proposed according to the following characteristics: The vehicle targets in the UAV image are relatively small and dense. The average precision (AP) increased by 5.48%, from 92.01% to 97.49%, which still remains the rather high processing speed of the YOLO network. Finally, the proposed framework is tested using three datasets: COWC, VEDAI, and CAR. The experimental results demonstrate that our method had a better detection capability.