EL-YOLO: An efficient and lightweight low-altitude aerial objects detector for onboard applications

Abstract

Existing deep learning-based low-altitude small object detectors are typically complex in model architecture and demand substantial computational resources, making deployment for real-time detection tasks on edge computing devices challenging. To address this issue, we proposed EL-YOLO, an efficient and lightweight onboard applications object detector. Initially, in order to maintain a lightweight design and improve model accuracy, we propose a novel approach called Sparsely Connected Asymptotic Feature Pyramid Network(SCAFPN). This approach aims to eliminate inter-layer interference during feature fusion, thereby enhancing the model’s performance. Furthermore, to establish long-range contextual relationships for small object scale information, we devise a Cross-Space Learning Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism (CSL-MHSA). To assess EL-YOLO capability for onboard small object detection, we deploy it on the embedded NVIDIA Jetson Xavier Nx platform and employ NVIDIA TensorRT FP16 quantization acceleration. On the VisDrone2019-DET and AI-TOD datasets, EL-YOLO demonstrates a 12.4% and 1.3% improvement in mAP50 compared to YOLOv5s. In comparison with the state-of-the-art YOLOv8s proposed in 2023, it achieves a respective 2.8% and 10.7% increase in mAP50. Moreover, the inference speed for the Small model reaches 24 frames per second, while the Nano model achieves 35 frames per second. This method holds promise for direct integration onto unmanned aerial vehicles for aerial small object detection tasks in the future.