Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle detection based on generative adversarial network data augmentation

As the application of UAVs in military and civilian fields becomes more and more widespread, the detection of UAVs in the low-altitude range has also become an important research direction. Compared with radar and visible light detection, infrared technology has become the major UAV detection method with its advantages of all-weather and long range. Most of the current infrared target detection methods are based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), which achieve target detection through feature extraction and feature classification. The performance of all such detection algorithms is highly dependent on their training set. A data set with a large number of samples and wide coverage tends to train a more robust and accurate detector. So, to obtain better detection effects, we perform data augmentation on the infrared UAV dataset by adversarial generative network (GAN). First, we extract the targets from the training set and train a GAN network, using its generator to obtain many new targets which are different from the training set samples, then we randomly extend these targets to the original dataset, and finally we retrain the detectors using the new dataset to achieve better detection. We created an infrared UAV image dataset for our experiments, with only a single target on each image. After data augmentation, multiple UAV targets are randomly generated. The experiments demonstrate that the new dataset trains the model with better detection results. And the GAN data augmentation can be combined with many advanced detectors to make a large improvement in detection.