Lightweight Feature Fusion Network for Object Detection in Aerial Photography Images

The existing aerial photography image object detection algorithms have several problems, such as complicated models, too many hyperparameters, and poor detection accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight multiscale feature fusion network for object detection in aerial photography images. The proposed network employs the idea of Anchor-Free and reduces the hyperparameters related to Anchor through pixel-by-pixel prediction. First, MobileNetV3 is adopted as the backbone network for feature extraction, and the Ghost bottleneck module is used as the base block for multiscale feature fusion to reduce number of parameters and computational costs. Then, deformable convolution is introduced to construct a deformable receptive field block to improve the robustness of the detector to the deformation of aerial photography objects. Furthermore, the label assignment strategy SimOTA is employed for dynamic sample matching, which alleviates the problems of dense distribution and heavy occlusion of aerial photography objects. The proposed network is evaluated on VisDrone2019-DET and NWPU VHR-10 datasets. The detection accuracy AP50 of the proposed network reaches 26. 6% and 94. 4%, and the detection speed reaches 59. 9 and 79. 6 frame/s, respectively. Compared with other mainstream object detection networks, the proposed network has fewer parameters and computational costs while maintaining high detection accuracy and speed, making it more suitable for airborne computing devices.