XIA Linlin,ZHANG Bo,CHEN Mingli,et al.An Accurate Detection Method for Small Bird Targets in Low-altitude Scenarios[J].ACTA ARMAMENTARII,2026,47(07):251080.
XIA Linlin,ZHANG Bo,CHEN Mingli,et al.An Accurate Detection Method for Small Bird Targets in Low-altitude Scenarios[J].ACTA ARMAMENTARII,2026,47(07):251080.DOI: 10.12382/bgxb.2025.1080.
An Accurate Detection Method for Small Bird Targets in Low-altitude Scenarios
针对航天发射场及机场共有的低空复杂背景下鸟类小目标识别难、易发生鸟击事件、威胁航空安全与人员生命等问题,提出一种基于YOLOv8n的深度增强尺度感知网络DESN-YOLOv8n(Deeply Enhanced Scale-aware Network based on YOLOv8n),专注于鸟类小目标检测。该模型通过构建主干网络特征融合模块C2F_DCA,利用深度可分离卷积与高效通道注意力机制增强空间特征提取能力,放大超小目标微弱特征。同时考虑颈部网络Concat模块直接拼接浅、深层特征,关键特征易随上下采样丢失问题,引入自适应空间特征融合模块,以聚焦小目标有效区域。在损失计算方面,使用归一化Wasserstein距离损失函数,将边界框建模为2D高斯分布,有效防止漏检和定位偏移。公共数据集AirBirds上的实验结果表明,新模型在小目标检测精度、特征增强能力和回归优化效果方面均取得显著提升。
Abstract
In the low-altitude complex backgrounds common in aerospace launch sites and airports, the small bird targets are difficultly identified, and the bird strike incidents may pose significant threats to aviation safety and human lives. This paper proposes a deeply enhanced scale-aware network based on YOLOv8n (DESN-YOLOv8n) specifically designed for small bird target detection. DESN-YOLOv8n model constructs a backbone feature fusion module C2F_DCA, which enhances the spatial feature extraction and amplify the subtle characteristics of ultra-small targets through the depthwise separable convolutions and an efficient channel attention mechanism. Additionally, to address the issue that direct concatenation of shallow and deep features in the Concat module of neck network may lead to the loss of critical information during upsampling and downsampling, an adaptive spatial feature fusion module is introduced to focus on the salient regions of small targets. In terms of loss computation, a normalized Wasserstein distance loss function is employed, which to model the bounding boxes as 2D Gaussian distributions, effectively mitigating the missed detections and localization deviation. Experimental results on the public dataset AirBirds demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significant improvements in small target detection accuracy, feature enhancement capability, and regression optimization performance.
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