Automated object detection on aerial images for limited capacity embedded device using a lightweight CNN model

Abstract

With the growing demand for geospatial data, challenging aerial images with high spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution achieve excellent development. Currently, deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) structures are applied widely for object detection. Nevertheless, existing deep CNN-based models consist of complex network structures and require immense amounts of graphics processing unit (GPU) computation power with high energy consumption. Thus, achieving efficient real-time object detection for limited memory and processing capacity embedded device is a major challenge. This paper proposes a feasible and lightweight object detection model based on deep CNN where a mobile inverted bottleneck module is adopted in the backbone structure. Moreover, an enhanced spatial pyramid pooling is adopted to increase the receptive field in the network by concatenating the multi-scale local region features. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model achieved higher average precision and required the smallest memory storage compared to previous works. Moreover, the proposed model offers the best trade-offs in terms of detection accuracy, model size, and detection time which has excellent potential to be deployed on limited capacity embedded device.