Track Boosting and Synthetic Data Aided Drone Detection

This is the paper for the first place winning solution of the Drone vs. Bird Challenge, organized by AVSS 2021. As the usage of drones increases with lowered costs and improved drone technology, drone detection emerges as a vital object detection task. However, detecting distant drones under unfavorable conditions, namely weak contrast, long-range, low visibility, requires effective algorithms. Our method approaches the drone detection problem by fine-tuning a YOLOv5 model with real and synthetically generated data using a Kalman-based object tracker to boost detection confidence. Our results indicate that augmenting the real data with an optimal subset of synthetic data can increase the performance. Moreover, temporal information gathered by object tracking methods can increase performance further.

Increasing Data Diversity with Iterative Sampling to Improve Performance

As a part of the Data-Centric AI Competition, we propose a data-centric approach to improve the diversity of the training samples by iterative sampling. The method itself relies strongly on the fidelity of augmented samples and the diversity of the augmentation methods. Moreover, we improve the performance further by introducing more samples for the difficult classes especially providing closer samples to edge cases potentially those the model at hand misclassifies.