Aircraft Target Detection Research Articles

SAR-NTV-YOLOv8: A Neural Network Aircraft Detection Method in SAR Images Based on Despeckling Preprocessing

Monitoring aircraft using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a very important task. Given its coherent imaging characteristics, there is a large amount of speckle interference in the image. This phenomenon leads to the scattering information of aircraft targets being masked in SAR images, which is easily confused with background scattering points. Therefore, automatic detection of aircraft targets in SAR images remains a challenging task. For this task, this paper proposes a framework for speckle reduction preprocessing of SAR images, followed by the use of an improved deep learning method to detect aircraft in SAR images. Firstly, to improve the problem of introducing artifacts or excessive smoothing in speckle reduction using total variation (TV) methods, this paper proposes a new nonconvex total variation (NTV) method. This method aims to ensure the effectiveness of speckle reduction while preserving the original scattering information as much as possible. Next, we present a framework for aircraft detection based on You Only Look Once v8 (YOLOv8) for SAR images. Therefore, the complete framework is called SAR-NTV-YOLOv8. Meanwhile, a high-resolution small target feature head is proposed to mitigate the impact of scale changes and loss of depth feature details on detection accuracy. Then, an efficient multi-scale attention module was proposed, aimed at effectively establishing short-term and long-term dependencies between feature grouping and multi-scale structures. In addition, the progressive feature pyramid network was chosen to avoid information loss or degradation in multi-level transmission during the bottom-up feature extraction process in Backbone. Sufficient comparative experiments, speckle reduction experiments, and ablation experiments are conducted on the SAR-Aircraft-1.0 and SADD datasets. The results have demonstrated the effectiveness of SAR-NTV-YOLOv8, which has the most advanced performance compared to other mainstream algorithms.

SE-CBAM-YOLOv7: An Improved Lightweight Attention Mechanism-Based YOLOv7 for Real-Time Detection of Small Aircraft Targets in Microsatellite Remote Sensing Imaging

Addressing real-time aircraft target detection in microsatellite-based visible light remote sensing video imaging requires considering the limitations of imaging payload resolution, complex ground backgrounds, and the relative positional changes between the platform and aircraft. These factors lead to multi-scale variations in aircraft targets, making high-precision real-time detection of small targets in complex backgrounds a significant challenge for detection algorithms. Hence, this paper introduces a real-time aircraft target detection algorithm for remote sensing imaging using an improved lightweight attention mechanism that relies on the You Only Look Once version 7 (YOLOv7) framework (SE-CBAM-YOLOv7). The proposed algorithm replaces the standard convolution (Conv) with a lightweight convolutional squeeze-and-excitation convolution (SEConv) to reduce the computational parameters and accelerate the detection process of small aircraft targets, thus enhancing real-time onboard processing capabilities. In addition, the SEConv-based spatial pyramid pooling and connected spatial pyramid convolution (SPPCSPC) module extracts image features. It improves detection accuracy while the feature fusion section integrates the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) hybrid attention network, forming the convolutional block attention module Concat (CBAMCAT) module. Furthermore, it optimizes small aircraft target features in channel and spatial dimensions, improving the model’s feature fusion capabilities. Experiments on public remote sensing datasets reveal that the proposed SE-CBAM-YOLOv7 improves detection accuracy by 0.5% and the mAP value by 1.7% compared to YOLOv7, significantly enhancing the detection capability for small-sized aircraft targets in satellite remote sensing imaging.

An Infrared Aircraft Detection Algorithm Based on Context Perception Feature Enhancement

To address the issue of insufficient extraction of target features and the resulting impact on detection performance in long-range infrared aircraft target detection caused by small imaging area and weak radiation intensity starting from the idea of perceiving target context to enhance the features extracted by convolutional neural network, this paper proposes a detecting algorithm based on AWFGLC (adaptive weighted fusion of global–local context). Based on the mechanism of AWFGLC, the input feature map is randomly reorganized and partitioned along the channel dimension, resulting in two feature maps. One feature map is utilized by self-attention for global context modeling, establishing the correlation between target features and background features to highlight the salient features of the target, thereby enabling the detecting algorithm to better perceive the global features of the target. The other feature map is subjected to window partitioning, with max pooling and average pooling performed within each window to highlight the local features of the target. Subsequently, self-attention is applied to the pooled feature map for local context modeling, establishing the correlation between the target and its surrounding neighborhood, further enhancing the weaker parts of the target features, and enabling the detecting algorithm to better perceive the local features of the target. Based on the characteristics of the target, an adaptive weighted fusion strategy with learnable parameters is employed to aggregate the global context and local context feature maps. This results in a feature map containing more complete target information, enhancing the ability of the detection algorithm to distinguish between target and background. Finally, this paper integrates the mechanism of AWFGLC into YOLOv7 for the detection of infrared aircraft targets. The experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves mAP50 scores of 97.8% and 88.7% on self-made and publicly available infrared aircraft datasets, respectively. Moreover, the mAP50:95 scores reach 65.7% and 61.2%, respectively. These results outperform those of classical target detection algorithms, indicating the effective realization of infrared aircraft target detection.

CenterADNet: Infrared Video Target Detection Based on Central Point Regression.

Infrared video target detection is a fundamental technology within infrared warning and tracking systems. In long-distance infrared remote sensing images, targets often manifest as circular spots or even single points. Due to the weak and similar characteristics of the target to the background noise, the intelligent detection of these targets is extremely complex. Existing deep learning-based methods are affected by the downsampling of image features by convolutional neural networks, causing the features of small targets to almost disappear. So, we propose a new infrared video weak-target detection network based on central point regression. We focus on suppressing the image background by fusing the different features between consecutive frames with the original image features to eliminate the background's influence. We also employ high-resolution feature preservation and incorporate a spatial-temporal attention module into the network to capture as many target features as possible and improve detection accuracy. Our method achieves superior results on the infrared image weak aircraft target detection dataset proposed by the National University of Defense Technology, as well as on the simulated dataset generated based on real-world observation. This demonstrates the efficiency of our approach for detecting weak point targets in infrared continuous images.

Aircraft target detection in SAR images based on MA-DETR

Aircraft target detection in SAR images based on MA-DETR

DiffDet4SAR: Diffusion-Based Aircraft Target Detection Network for SAR Images

DiffDet4SAR: Diffusion-Based Aircraft Target Detection Network for SAR Images

Military Aircraft Target Detection Algorithm Based on Improved YOLOv8s

Military Aircraft Target Detection Algorithm Based on Improved YOLOv8s

End-to-end Remote Sensing Image Aircraft Target Detection and Fine-grained Recognition Framework

In view of the practical application of target detection and recognition tasks for remote sensing, an end-to-end aircraft target detection and fine-grained recognition framework is proposed. It can accurately and quickly implement detection and recognition in an end-to-end way. The main network of the framework adopts the design ideas of target detection and fine-grained recognition methods using candidate region extract and visual attention, making sure the accuracy of detection and recognition. Then, to solve the problem of high false detection rate and missed detection rate of densely arranged targets, we propose the re-detection mechanism. To minimize the large amounts of calculations of deep networks and improve real-time performance, we introduce depthwise separable convolution to optimize networks. Finally, a weight mapping idea based on transfer learning is adopted to solve the problem of data labeling and also helps the detection and fine-grained recognition. The results prove that the proposed framework has good robustness, versatility, and efficiency in aircraft detection and fine-grained recognition tasks.

A Fast Facet-Based SAR Imaging Model and Target Detection Based on YOLOv5 with CBAM and Another Detection Head

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image target detection is of great significance in civil surveillance and military reconnaissance. However, there are few publicly released SAR image datasets of typical non-cooperative targets. Aiming to solve this problem, a fast facet-based SAR imaging model is proposed to simulate the SAR images of non-cooperative aircraft targets under different conditions. Combining the iterative physical optics and the Kirchhoff approximation, the scattering coefficient of each facet on the target and rough surface can be obtained. Then, the radar echo signal of an aircraft target above a rough surface environment can be generated, and the SAR images can be simulated under different conditions. Finally, through the simulation experiments, a dataset of typical non-cooperative targets can be established. Combining the YOLOv5 network with the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) and another detection head, a SAR image target detection model based on the established dataset is realized. Compared with other YOLO series detectors, the simulation results show a significant improvement in precision. Moreover, the automatic target recognition system presented in this paper can provide a reference for the detection and recognition of non-cooperative aircraft targets and has great practical application in situational awareness of battlefield conditions.

Aircraft Target Detection from Remote Sensing Images under Complex Meteorological Conditions

Taking all-day, all-weather airport security protection as the application demand, and aiming at the lack of complex meteorological conditions processing capability of current remote sensing image aircraft target detection algorithms, this paper takes the YOLOX algorithm as the basis, reduces model parameters by using depth separable convolution, improves feature extraction speed and detection efficiency, and at the same time, introduces different cavity convolution in its backbone network to increase the perceptual field and improve the model’s detection accuracy. Compared with the mainstream target detection algorithms, the proposed YOLOX-DD algorithm has the highest detection accuracy under complex meteorological conditions such as nighttime and dust, and can efficiently and reliably detect the aircraft in other complex meteorological conditions including fog, rain, and snow, with good anti-interference performance.

Aircraft Target Detection in Low Signal-to-Noise Ratio Visible Remote Sensing Images

With the increasing demand for the wide-area refined detection of aircraft targets, remote sensing cameras have adopted an ultra-large area-array detector as a new imaging mode to obtain broad width remote sensing images (RSIs) with higher resolution. However, this imaging technology introduces new special image degradation characteristics, especially the weak target energy and the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the image, which seriously affect the target detection capability. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an aircraft detection method for RSIs with low SNR, termed L-SNR-YOLO. In particular, the backbone is built blending a swin-transformer and convolutional neural network (CNN), which obtains multiscale global and local RSI information to enhance the algorithm’s robustness. Moreover, we design an effective feature enhancement (EFE) block integrating the concept of nonlocal means filtering to make the aircraft features significant. In addition, we utilize a novel loss function to optimize the detection accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that our L-SNR-YOLO achieves better detection performance in RSIs than several existing advanced methods.

YOLO-Class: Detection and Classification of Aircraft Targets in Satellite Remote Sensing Images Based on YOLO-Extract

YOLO-Class: Detection and Classification of Aircraft Targets in Satellite Remote Sensing Images Based on YOLO-Extract

Aircraft target detection method based on improved SSD

Aircraft target detection method based on improved SSD

Complex Optical Remote-Sensing Aircraft Detection Dataset and Benchmark

Aircraft detection in remote sensing images is significant in both military and civilian fields, such as air traffic control and battlefield dynamic monitoring. Deep learning methods can achieve promising detection performance with sufficient and labeled samples. However, current aircraft datasets are mainly from a single data source and lack diverse scenes and targets, making it difficult to train a robust and generalized detector. Therefore, we manually label and construct a complex optical remote sensing aircraft target detection dataset (CORS-ADD) from Google Earth and multiple satellites such as WorldView-2, WorldView-3, Pleiades, Jilin-1, and IKONOS. It contains 7,337 images covering typical airports and various rare scenes, including the aircraft carrier, ocean and land with flying aircraft. The dataset consists of 32,285 civil and military aircraft instances, including bombers, fighters, and early warning aircraft. These targets range from 4×4 pixels to 240×240 pixels and are all labeled with both horizontal bounding box (HBB) and oriented bounding box (OBB) annotations. The various scenes and sufficient instances can fully support the training and evaluation of data-driven algorithms. Meanwhile, based on the constructed dataset, we train and evaluate several detectors to provide a benchmark and help promote the development of aircraft detection techniques.

Synthetic aperture radar image aircraft detection based on target spatial imaging characteristics

With the development of artificial intelligence and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging technology, methods based on deep learning have been gradually applied to SAR image aircraft detection. However, due to the special SAR imaging mechanism, the imaging results of aircraft targets in SAR images do not have clear features and appear as sparse scattering centers. In addition, airports contain strongly scattering buildings and objects, such as corridor bridges, which will bring huge interference to SAR aircraft target detection. To alleviate these problems, we propose an aircraft scattering information extraction and detection model (SIEDM) based on the spatial imaging characteristics of the targets. First, a scattering center feature extraction module is designed to extract the potential scattering centers of the aircraft targets in the SAR images and acquire the overall structural features of the aircraft targets. In addition, the adaptive noise suppression module is proposed to suppress background interference by learning global information. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments on an SAR image aircraft detection dataset. The experimental results show that the mean average precision of the aircraft SIEDM is 95.7%, which is better than other methods, and the proposed modules in this paper are effective.

Micro-Doppler Feature Extraction of Rotating Structures of Aircraft Targets with Terahertz Radar

The micro-Doppler features formed by the micro-motion of rotating blades of rotors and turbines are of great significance for aircraft target detection and recognition. Mastering the micro-motion features is the premise of radar target identification. The blades’ length and rotation rate are vital parameters for classifying aircraft targets. One can instantly judge the type and state of the targets by extracting micro-Doppler features. To extract the micro-Doppler features of rotating blades of the turbine target, we utilized microwave-band and terahertz-band radar to simulate the target and extract the Doppler frequency-shift information. For a turbine model with an obvious blade tip structure, we propose an algorithm based on wavelet coefficient enhancement and inverse Radon transform, integrating the time–frequency analysis with image processing. Under low SNR, this method allows for a high-accuracy parameter estimate. For a two-bladed rotor model without an obvious blade tip structure, we conducted an actual measurement experiment on the model utilizing a 120 GHz radar, and we propose a parameter estimation algorithm based on the fitting of the time–frequency distribution. By fitting the data of the time–frequency diagram, the micro-motion characteristic parameters of the rotor target were obtained. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate the benefits of terahertz radar in target detection, and indicate that the proposed algorithms have the characteristics of high extraction precision and insensitivity to noise.

Detection spectrum optimization of stealth aircraft targets from a space-based infrared platform

Advances in infrared detection techniques require novel spectrum dynamic-modification strategies capable of sensing unprecedentedly low target radiant intensities. a conventional fixed-spectrum detection system cannot satisfy the effective detection of stealth aircraft targets due to complex Earth background clutter and atmospheric attenuation. Therefore, a detection method that can highlight aircraft targets is urgently needed to enhance stealth aircraft detectability. In this research, a spectrum set consisting of different bandwidths associated with a central wavelength is established. Furthermore, a signal-to-noise ratio of the stealth aircraft is computed using the established spectrum set. Finally, the optimal spectrum is selected according to the maximal signal-to-noise ratio from the spectrum set. Our numerical experiments and simulations further demonstrate that the proposed methodology can substantially strengthen the detection performance of stealth aircraft compared with traditional fixed-spectrum detection systems. This work on detection spectrum optimization paves the way to stealth aircraft detection and opens new vistas in the field of target detection technology.

Aircraft Target Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on Improved YOLOv5

Dealing with the insufficient detection accuracy and speed of aircraft targets in remote sensing images under complex background, this paper proposes a new detection method, YOLOv5-Aircraft, based on the YOLOv5 network. The YOLOv5-Aircraft model is improved in 3 ways: (1) At the beginning and end of original batch normalization module, centering and scaling calibration are added to enhance the effective features and form a more stable feature distribution, which strengthens the feature extraction ability of network model. (2) The cross-entropy loss function in the confidence of the original loss function is improved to the loss function based on smoothed Kullback-Leibler divergence. (3) For reducing information loss, the CSandGlass module is designed on the backbone feature extraction network of YOLOv5 to replace the residual module. Meanwhile, low-resolution feature layers are eliminated to reduce semantic loss. Experiment results demonstrate that the YOLOv5-Aircraft model can enhance the accuracy and speed of aircraft target detection in remote sensing images while achieving easier convergence.

A Novel Method of Aircraft Detection under Complex Background Based on Circular Intensity Filter and Rotation Invariant Feature.

Aircraft detection in remote sensing images (RSIs) has drawn widespread attention in recent years, which has been widely used in the military and civilian fields. While the complex background, variations of aircraft pose and size bring great difficulties to the effective detection. In this paper, we propose a novel aircraft target detection scheme based on small training samples. The scheme is coarse-to-fine, which consists of two main stages: region proposal and target identification. First, in the region proposal stage, a circular intensity filter, which is designed based on the characteristics of the aircraft target, can quickly locate the centers of multi-scale suspicious aircraft targets in the RSIs pyramid. Then the target regions can be extracted by adding bounding boxes. This step can get high-quality but few candidate regions. Second, in the stage of target identification, we proposed a novel rotation-invariant feature, which combines rotation-invariant histogram of oriented gradient and vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD). The feature can characterize the aircraft target well by avoiding the impact of its rotation and can be effectively used to remove false alarms. Experiments are conducted on Remote Sensing Object Detection (RSOD) dataset to compare the proposed method with other advanced methods. The results show that the proposed method can quickly and accurately detect aircraft targets in RSIs and achieve a better performance.

Detection of aircraft targets varies as a function of target and masker temporal complexity, similarity, and realism

The complexity of real-world auditory scenes makes it difficult to disentangle the factors that drive detectability of sounds within those scenes. However, many real-world applications of auditory perception research require the disentanglement of these factors – for example, to predict the effects of aircraft noise on the public depending on the ambient sound environment and the aircraft itself. The present study investigates effects of masker temporal complexity and similarity to targets on the detectability of helicopter target sounds. We investigate three levels of masker temporal complexity – urban sound scenes (high); synthetic versions of each scene that preserve overall statistics (medium); and noise of the same spectrum as the real scene (low). Target similarity was probed in a way that would occur in the world—as a function of the presence of other engine sounds. Each real masking sound could be comprised of only engine noise, engine sounds embedded in an urban scene, or a scene without engines. This provides maskers with three levels of target similarity. Combination with the three levels of temporal complexity allows us to probe interactions between temporal complexity and engine-related signal energy. Effects of target signal characteristics and interactions with signal to noise ratio will be discussed.