A Lightweight and Accurate UAV Detection Method Based on YOLOv4

At present, the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) has been widely used both in civilian and military fields. Most of the current object detection algorithms used to detect UAVs require more parameters, and it is difficult to achieve real-time performance. In order to solve this problem while ensuring a high accuracy rate, we further lighten the model and reduce the number of parameters of the model. This paper proposes an accurate and lightweight UAV detection model based on YOLOv4. To verify the effectiveness of this model, we made a UAV dataset, which contains four types of UAVs and 20,365 images. Through comparative experiments and optimization of existing deep learning and object detection algorithms, we found a lightweight model to achieve an efficient and accurate rapid detection of UAVs. First, from the comparison of the one-stage method and the two-stage method, it is concluded that the one-stage method has better real-time performance and considerable accuracy in detecting UAVs. Then, we further compared the one-stage methods. In particular, for YOLOv4, we replaced MobileNet with its backbone network, modified the feature extraction network, and replaced standard convolution with depth-wise separable convolution, which greatly reduced the parameters and realized 82 FPS and 93.52% mAP while ensuring high accuracy and taking into account the real-time performance.