Aircraft Objection Detection Method of Airport Surface based on Improved YOLOv5

An aircraft object detection method on the basis of improved YOLOv5 was proposed to address the issues of large model size, high number of parameters, and inability to meet real-time monitoring requirements of aircrafts in traditional object detection. Firstly, the basic unit of ShuffleNetv2 network was optimized through replacing 3x3 convolution with 5x5 convolution and removing subsequent 1x1 convolution. Simultaneously, the original ReLU activation function was replaced with PReLU. Secondly, CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module) attention mechanism was developed to enhance the detection accuracy of the improved network. Finally, improved ShuffleNetv2 network was applied as the backbone structure of YOLOv5. Experimental results revealed that the parameter number of the improved YOLOv5 method introduced in this paper was decreased by 18 times, with a model size of 1.03M. Therefore, a 20.8% increase was achieved in frames per second (FPS) in GPU environments and a 234.6% increase was observed in FPS in CPU environments, while a mean average precision (mAP@0.5) of 0.99 was maintained compared with traditional YOLOv5 network. Because of the advantages of fewer parameters, faster recognition speed, higher localization accuracy, and smaller memory requirement, the developed method was found to be suitable for real-time monitoring of aircrafts in airport surface.