Cong Zhang

The rampant misuse of drones poses a serious threat to national security and human life. Currently, CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) are widely used to detect drones. However, small drone targets often reduced amplitude or even lost features in infrared images which traditional CNN cannot overcome. This paper proposes a Progressive Feature Fusion Network (PFFNET) and designs a Pooling Pyramid Fusion (PFM) to provide more effective global contextual priors for the highest downsampling output. Then, the Feature Selection Model (FSM) is designed to improve the use of the output coding graph and enhance the feature representation of the target in the network. Finally, a lightweight segmentation head is designed to achieve progressive feature fusion with multi-layer outputs. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has good real-time performance and high accuracy in drone target detection. On the public dataset, the intersection over union (IOU) is improved by 2.5% and the detection time is reduced by 81%.

The rampant misuse of drones poses a serious threat to national security and human life. Currently, the CNN method has been widely used in drone detection. However, there is a challenge that traditional CNN cannot cope with, which is small drone targets often have reduced amplitude or even lost features in infrared images. This paper proposes a Progressive Feature Fusion Network (PFFNet) that gradually increases the response amplitude of the target in the deep network. The Feature Selection Model (FSM) is designed to improve the utilisation of the output coding graph and enhance the feature representation of the target in the network. A lightweight segmentation head is also designed to achieve progressive feature fusion with multi-layer outputs. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve low duration and high accuracy in drone target detection. On the public dataset, the IoU is improved by 2.53% and the detection time is reduced by 81.03%.

In outdoor sports such as alpine skiing, athletes hope to obtain information such as movement trajectory and speed to achieve scientific training. The portable sensor has a sense of restraint and affects the athlete’s performance. Cameras have difficulty capturing the whole race in an outdoor environment. For alpine skiing needs, we designed an alpine skiing information acquisition system, using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and ground cameras to obtain information on the whole path of the race. The environment of the alpine skiing field, the high-speed curvilinear movement of athletes and the flight characteristics of UAVs cause challenges in the detection and tracking of athletes by UAVs. To realize the detection and tracking of alpine skiing by UAVs, we propose a detection algorithm by combining neural networks and correlation filters. A tracking confidence score based on the motion distance of the interval frame is defined. When the tracking confidence of the neural network detector is less than the threshold, the correlation filter is used to expand the recognition range and realize redetection. In addition, we created and annotated a fresh alpine skiing dataset. We compare our algorithm with four advanced algorithms on the UAV123 dataset. Three methods are used to evaluate the performance of our method on the alpine skiing sequence dataset. From the simulation results, our algorithm outperforms the comparison methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Therefore, our algorithm has application value in the scientific training of alpine skiers.

Due to the complexity of background and diversity of small targets, robust detection of infrared small targets for the trajectory correction fuze has become a challenge. To solve this problem, different from the traditional method, a state-of-the-art detection method based on density-distance space is proposed to apply to the trajectory correction fuze. First, parameters of the infrared image sensor on the fuze are calculated to set the boundary limitations for the target detection method. Second, the density-distance space method is proposed to detect the candidate targets. Finally, the adaptive pixel growth (APG) algorithm is used to suppress the clutter so as to detect the real targets. Three experiments, including equivalent detection, simulation and hardware-in-loop, were implemented to verify the effectiveness of this method. Results illustrated that the infrared image sensor on the fuze has a stable field of view under rotation of the projectile, and could clearly observe the infrared small target. The proposed method has superior anti-noise, different size target detection, multi-target detection and various clutter suppression capability. Compared with six novel algorithms, our algorithm shows a perfect detection performance and acceptable time consumption.

For a higher attack accuracy of projectiles, a novel mechanical and electronic video stabilization strategy is proposed for trajectory correction fuze. In this design, the complexity of sensors and actuators were reduced. To cope with complex combat environments, an infrared image sensor was used to provide video output. Following the introduction of the fuze’s workflow, the limitation of sensors for mechanical video stabilization on fuze was proposed. Particularly, the parameters of the infrared image sensor that strapdown with fuze were calculated. Then, the transformation relation between the projectile’s motion and the shaky video was investigated so that the electronic video stabilization method could be determined. Correspondingly, a novel method of dividing sub-blocks by adaptive global gray threshold was proposed for the image pre-processing. In addition, the gray projection algorithm was used to estimate the global motion vector by calculating the correlation between the curves of the adjacent frames. An example simulation and experiment were implemented to verify the effectiveness of this strategy. The results illustrated that the proposed algorithm significantly reduced the computational cost without affecting the accuracy of the motion estimation. This research provides theoretical and experimental basis for the intelligent application of sensor systems on fuze.