Efficient Object Detection Method Based on Improved YOLOv3 Network for Remote Sensing Images

In the future, Drones or general Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) need to implement online real-time object detection, but their memory and computing power are limited. An improved YOLOv3 is adopted in this paper, making full use of the lightweight network instead of the feature extraction network of YOLOv3 to achieve high-efficiency object detection for remote sensing images. In the case of similar detection accuracy, parameters and FLOPs (floating point operations) of the improved model are 2.5 times and 3.3 times smaller than YOLOv3, respectively. In addition, an IoU K-medians algorithm is proposed, which improves mAP by 7.0% on YOLOv3 and by 2.3% on the improved YOLOv3.Experiments show that the detection speed of the improved YOLOv3 is 101 frame/s at the fastest, and it is still 1.6 times faster than that of YOLOv3 when its mAP is 6% higher than that of YOLOv3. The efficient remote sensing object detection method proposed in this paper lays the foundation for future UAVs.