YOLO-Drone: A Scale-Aware Detector for Drone Vision

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Object detection is an important task in drone vision. Since the number of objects and their scales always vary greatly in the drone-captured video, small object-oriented feature becomes the bottleneck of model performance, and most existing object detectors tend to underperform in drone-vision scenes. To solve these problems, we propose a novel detector named YOLO-Drone. In the proposed detector, the backbone of YOLO is firstly replaced with ConvNeXt, which is the state-of-the-art one to extract more discriminative features. Then, a novel scale-aware attention (SAA) module is designed in detection head to solve the large disparity scale problem. A scale-sensitive loss (SSL) is also introduced to put more emphasis on object scale to enhance the discriminative ability of the proposed detector. Experimental results on the latest VisDrone 2022 test-challenge dataset (detection track) show that our detector can achieve average precision (AP) of 39.43%, which is tied with the previous state-of-the-art, meanwhile, reducing 39.8% of the computational cost.