Aircraft Target Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on Improved YOLOv5

Dealing with the insufficient detection accuracy and speed of aircraft targets in remote sensing images under complex background, this paper proposes a new detection method, YOLOv5-Aircraft, based on the YOLOv5 network. The YOLOv5-Aircraft model is improved in 3 ways: (1) At the beginning and end of original batch normalization module, centering and scaling calibration are added to enhance the effective features and form a more stable feature distribution, which strengthens the feature extraction ability of network model. (2) The cross-entropy loss function in the confidence of the original loss function is improved to the loss function based on smoothed Kullback-Leibler divergence. (3) For reducing information loss, the CSandGlass module is designed on the backbone feature extraction network of YOLOv5 to replace the residual module. Meanwhile, low-resolution feature layers are eliminated to reduce semantic loss. Experiment results demonstrate that the YOLOv5-Aircraft model can enhance the accuracy and speed of aircraft target detection in remote sensing images while achieving easier convergence.