Real-Time Object Detection from UAV Inspection Videos by Combining YOLOv5s and DeepStream

The high-altitude real-time inspection of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has always been a very challenging task. Because high-altitude inspections are susceptible to interference from different weather conditions, interference from communication signals and a larger field of view result in a smaller object area to be identified. We adopted a method that combines a UAV system scheduling platform with artificial intelligence object detection to implement the UAV automatic inspection technology. We trained the YOLOv5s model on five different categories of vehicle data sets, in which mAP50 and mAP50-95 reached 93.2% and 71.7%, respectively. The YOLOv5s model size is only 13.76 MB, and the detection speed of a single inspection photo reaches 11.26 ms. It is a relatively lightweight model and is suitable for deployment on edge devices for real-time detection. In the original DeepStream framework, we set up the http communication protocol to start quickly to enable different users to call and use it at the same time. In addition, asynchronous sending of alarm frame interception function was added and the auxiliary services were set up to quickly resume video streaming after interruption. We deployed the trained YOLOv5s model on the improved DeepStream framework to implement automatic UAV inspection.