PFFNET: A Fast Progressive Feature Fusion Network for Detecting Drones in Infrared Images

The rampant misuse of drones poses a serious threat to national security and human life. Currently, CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) are widely used to detect drones. However, small drone targets often reduced amplitude or even lost features in infrared images which traditional CNN cannot overcom...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ziqiang Han, Cong Zhang, Hengzhen Feng, Mingkai Yue, Kangnan Quan
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-06-01
Series:Drones
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/7/7/424
Description
Summary:The rampant misuse of drones poses a serious threat to national security and human life. Currently, CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) are widely used to detect drones. However, small drone targets often reduced amplitude or even lost features in infrared images which traditional CNN cannot overcome. This paper proposes a Progressive Feature Fusion Network (PFFNET) and designs a Pooling Pyramid Fusion (PFM) to provide more effective global contextual priors for the highest downsampling output. Then, the Feature Selection Model (FSM) is designed to improve the use of the output coding graph and enhance the feature representation of the target in the network. Finally, a lightweight segmentation head is designed to achieve progressive feature fusion with multi-layer outputs. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has good real-time performance and high accuracy in drone target detection. On the public dataset, the intersection over union (IOU) is improved by 2.5% and the detection time is reduced by 81%.
ISSN:2504-446X