Domain Feature Decomposition for Efficient Object Detection in Aerial Images

Object detection in UAV aerial images faces domain-adaptive challenges, such as changes in shooting height, viewing angle, and weather. These changes constitute a large number of fine-grained domains that place greater demands on the network’s generalizability. To tackle these challenges, we initially decompose image features into domain-invariant and domain-specific features using practical imaging condition parameters. The composite feature can improve domain generalization and single-domain accuracy compared to the conventional fine-grained domain-detection method. Then, to solve the problem of the overfitting of high-frequency imaging condition parameters, we mixed images from different imaging conditions in a balanced sampling manner as input for the training of the detection network. The data-augmentation method improves the robustness of training and reduces the overfitting of high-frequency imaging parameters. The proposed algorithm is compared with state-of-the-art fine-grained domain detectors on the UAVDT and VisDrone datasets. The results show that it achieves an average detection precision improvement of 5.7 and 2.4, respectively. The airborne experiments validate that the algorithm achieves a 20 Hz processing performance for 720P images on an onboard computer with Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX.