High-Resolution Drone Detection Based on Background Difference and SAG-YOLOv5s

To solve the problem of low accuracy and slow speed of drone detection in high-resolution images with fixed cameras, we propose a detection method combining background difference and lightweight network SAG-YOLOv5s. First, background difference is used to extract potential drone targets in high-resolution images, eliminating most of the background to reduce computational overhead. Secondly, the Ghost module and SimAM attention mechanism are introduced on the basis of YOLOv5s to reduce the total number of model parameters and improve feature extraction, and <i>α</i>-DIoU loss is used to replace the original DIoU loss to improve the accuracy of bounding box regression. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of our method, a high-resolution drone dataset is made based on the public data set. Experimental results show that the detection accuracy of the proposed method reaches 97.6%, 24.3 percentage points higher than that of YOLOv5s, and the detection speed in 4K video reaches 13.2 FPS, which meets the actual demand and is significantly better than similar algorithms. It achieves a good balance between detection accuracy and detection speed and provides a method benchmark for high-resolution drone detection under a fixed camera.