An algorithm for detecting dense small objects in aerial photography based on coordinate position attention module

Abstract

AbstractTo address the challenges of detecting a large number of objects and a high proportion of small objects in aerial drone imagery, an aerial dense small object detection algorithm called coordinate position attention module you only look once (CPAM‐YOLO) is proposed based on the coordinate position attention module (CPAM). In the backbone network of CPAM‐YOLO, a CPAM is proposed and embedded that decomposes channel attention into two 1D feature encoding processes, and selectively combines the features of each position through the weighted sum of all position features. Finally, features are aggregated along two spatial directions, increasing the effective information utilization of input feature positions and channels. The backbone network, feature enhancement network, and detection heads have been optimized to improve detection accuracy while ensuring a lightweight detection network. Using lightweight backbone networks to significantly reduce the number of parameters while using high‐resolution feature enhancement networks to retain more semantic and detailed features. The algorithm's performance was evaluated using the publicly available VisDrone2019 dataset. Compared to the baseline network YOLOv5l, CPAM‐YOLO achieved a 4.5% improvement in mAP0.5 and a 3.2% improvement in mAP0.95. These experimental results demonstrate the strong practicality of the CPAM‐YOLO object detection network for detecting dense small objects in aerial image.