Development of Real-Time Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Urban Object Detection System with Federated Learning

Abstract

In this paper, an urban object detection system via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is developed to collect real-time traffic information, which can be further utilized in many applications such as traffic monitoring and urban traffic management. The system includes an object detection algorithm, deep learning model training, and deployment on a real UAV. For the object detection algorithm, the Mobilenet-SSD model is applied owing to its lightweight and efficiency, which make it suitable for real-time applications on an onboard microprocessor. For model training, federated learning (FL) is used to protect privacy and increase efficiency with parallel computing. Last, the FL-trained object detection model is deployed on a real UAV for real-time performance testing. The experimental results show that the object detection algorithm can reach a speed of 18 frames per second with good detection performance, which shows the real-time computation ability of a resource-limited edge device and also validates the effectiveness of the developed system.