FastUAV-NET: A Multi-UAV Detection Algorithm for Embedded Platforms

In this paper, a real-time deep learning-based framework for detecting and tracking Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in video streams captured by a fixed-wing UAV is proposed. The proposed framework consists of two steps, namely intra-frame multi-UAV detection and the inter-frame multi-UAV tracking. In the detection step, a new multi-scale UAV detection Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture based on a shallow version of You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLOv3-tiny) widened by Inception blocks is designed to extract local and global features from input video streams. Here, the widened multi-UAV detection network architecture is termed as FastUAV-NET and aims to improve UAV detection accuracy while preserving computing time of one-step deep detection algorithms in the context of UAV-UAV tracking. To detect UAVs, the FastUAV-NET architecture uses five inception units and adopts a feature pyramid network to detect UAVs. To obtain a high frame rate, the proposed method is applied to every nth frame and then the detected UAVs are tracked in intermediate frames using scalable Kernel Correlation Filter algorithm. The results on the generated UAV-UAV dataset illustrate that the proposed framework obtains 0.7916 average precision with 29 FPS performance on Jetson-TX2. The results imply that the widening of CNN network is a much more effective way than increasing the depth of CNN and leading to a good trade-off between accurate detection and real-time performance. The FastUAV-NET model will be publicly available to the research community to further advance multi-UAV-UAV detection algorithms.