TransEffiDet: Aircraft Detection and Classification in Aerial Images Based on EfficientDet and Transformer

In recent years, analysis and optimization algorithm based on image data is a research hotspot. Aircraft detection based on aerial images can provide data support for accurately attacking military targets. Although many efforts have been devoted, it is still challenging due to the poor environment, the vastness of the sky background, and so on. This paper proposes an aircraft detection method named TransEffiDet in aerial images based on the EfficientDet method and Transformer module. We improved the EfficientDet algorithm by combining it with the Transformer which models the long-range dependency for the feature maps. Specifically, we first employ EfficientDet as the backbone network, which can efficiently fuse the different scale feature maps. Then, deformable Transformer is used to analyze the long-range correlation for global feature extraction. Furthermore, we designed a fusion module to fuse the long-range and short-range features extracted by EfficientDet and deformable Transformer, respectively. Finally, object class is produced by feeding the feature map to the class prediction net and the bounding box predictions are generated by feeding these fused features to the box prediction net. The mean Average Precision (mAP) is 86.6%, which outperforms the EfficientDet by 5.8%. The experiment shows that TransEffiDet is more robust than other methods. Additionally, we have established a public aerial dataset for aircraft detection, which will be released along with this paper.