IEEE Access (Jan 2023)

UAV-Pose: A Dual Capture Network Algorithm for Low Altitude UAV Attitude Detection and Tracking

  • Jiang You,
  • Zixun Ye,
  • Jingliang Gu,
  • Juntao Pu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3333394
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11
pp. 129144 – 129155

Abstract

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This paper presents a low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attitude detection and tracking algorithm, named UAV-Pose. In the context of low-altitude UAV countermeasure tasks, precise attitude detection and tracking are crucial for achieving laser-guided precision strikes. To meet the varying requirements during the tracking stages, this study designs two capture networks with different resolutions. Firstly, a lightweight bottleneck structure, GhostNeck, is introduced to accelerate detection speed. Secondly, a significant improvement in detection accuracy is achieved by integrating an attention mechanism and SimCC loss. Additionally, a data augmentation method is proposed to adapt to attitude detection under atmospheric turbulence. A self-collected dataset, named UAV-ADT (UAV Attitude Detection and Tracking), is constructed for training and evaluating the target detection algorithm. The algorithm is deployed using the TensorRT tool and tested on the UAV-ADT dataset, demonstrating a detection speed of 300 frames per second (FPS) with a map75 reaching 97.8% and a PCK (Percentage of Correct Keypoints) metric reaching 99.3%. Real-world field experiments further validate the accurate detection and continuous tracking of UAV attitudes, providing essential support for counter-UAV operations.

Keywords