Learning adaptive detection and tracking collaborations with augmented UAV synthesis for accurate anti-UAV system

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have witnessed a significant use upsurge across various domains. However, their low cost and elusive size have raised significant security concerns. In particular, UAVs, imaged in the infrared mode, located in a cluttered background and being relatively small targets, pose formidable challenges. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel approach for accurate UAVs perception. The core innovation lies in learning an adaptive detection and tracking collaboration mechanism, supported by a novel method of training data augmentation (ADTC). During the test phase, ADTC begins by leveraging the detector to identify the potential target candidates within the image frame. These candidates are then refined by an adaptive selection module, where a Kalman filter is deployed to model and predict the motion trajectory of each candidate. The best result of the predicted trajectories with the detected candidates is adopted as the output. The adaptive selection module filters out less confident objects, efficiently decreasing processing time. Furthermore, we construct a new dataset Anti-MUAV15 to evaluate the performance of ADTC in multiple-UAV scenarios. Our approach has been rigorously evaluated through qualitative and quantitative experiments on the Anti-UAV, AntiUAV600 and Anti-MUAV15 datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art anti-UAV solutions in terms of robustness and precision, without imposing additional computational burden. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Shihan0325/Anti-MUAV15.