Target Detection Method of UAV Aerial Imagery Based on Improved YOLOv5

Due to the advantages of small size, lightweight, and simple operation, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been widely used, and it is also becoming increasingly convenient to capture high-resolution aerial images in a variety of environments. Existing target-detection methods for UAV aerial images lack outstanding performance in the face of challenges such as small targets, dense arrangement, sparse distribution, and a complex background. In response to the above problems, some improvements on the basis of YOLOv5l have been made by us. Specifically, three feature-extraction modules are proposed, using asymmetric convolutions. They are named the Asymmetric ResNet (ASResNet) module, Asymmetric Enhanced Feature Extraction (AEFE) module, and Asymmetric Res2Net (ASRes2Net) module, respectively. According to the respective characteristics of the above three modules, the residual blocks in different positions in the backbone of YOLOv5 were replaced accordingly. An Improved Efficient Channel Attention (IECA) module was added after Focus, and Group Spatial Pyramid Pooling (GSPP) was used to replace the Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) module. In addition, the K-Means++ algorithm was used to obtain more accurate anchor boxes, and the new EIOU-NMS method was used to improve the postprocessing ability of the model. Finally, ablation experiments, comparative experiments, and visualization of results were performed on five datasets, namely CIFAR-10, PASCAL VOC, VEDAI, VisDrone 2019, and Forklift. The effectiveness of the improved strategies and the superiority of the proposed method (YOLO-UAV) were verified. Compared with YOLOv5l, the backbone of the proposed method increased the top-one accuracy of the classification task by 7.20% on the CIFAR-10 dataset. The mean average precision (mAP) of the proposed method on the four object-detection datasets was improved by 5.39%, 5.79%, 4.46%, and 8.90%, respectively.