A Feature-Enhanced Anchor-Free Network for UAV Vehicle Detection

Vehicle detection based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images is a challenging task. One reason is that the objects are small size, low-resolution, and large scale variations, resulting in weak feature representation. Another reason is the imbalance between positive and negative examples. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for UAV vehicle detection to solve above problems. In detail, we use anchor-free mechanism to eliminate predefined anchors, which can reduce complicated computation and relieve the imbalance between positive and negative samples. Meanwhile, to enhance the features for vehicles, we design a multi-scale semantic enhancement block (MSEB) and an effective 49-layer backbone which is based on the DetNet59. The proposed network offers appropriate receptive fields that match the small-sized vehicles, and involves precise localization information provided by the contexts with high resolution. The MSEB strengthens discriminative feature representation at various scales, without reducing the spatial resolution of prediction layers. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Particularly, the main part of vehicles, much smaller ones, the accuracy is about 2% higher than other existing methods.