Uav detection with transfer learning from simulated data of laser active imaging

Abstract

With the development of our society, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) appear more frequently in people’s daily lives, which could become a threat to public security and privacy, especially at night. At the same time, laser active imaging is an important detection method for night vision. In this paper, we implement a UAV detection model for our laser active imaging system based on deep learning and a simulated dataset that we constructed. Firstly, the model is pre-trained on the largest available dataset. Then, it is transferred to a simulated dataset to learn about the UAV features. Finally, the trained model is tested on real laser active imaging data. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is greatly improved compared to the model not trained on the simulated dataset, which verifies the transferability of features learned from the simulated data, the effectiveness of the proposed simulation method, and the feasibility of our solution for UAV detection in the laser active imaging domain. Furthermore, a comparative experiment with the previous method is carried out. The results show that our model can achieve high-precision, real-time detection at 104.1 frames per second (FPS).