A combination of faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 for drone detection in images

TNU Journal of Science and Technology  
226(06): 90 - 96  
A COMBINATION OF FASTER R-CNN AND YOLOv2  
FOR DRONE DETECTION IN IMAGES  
Pham Van Viet*  
Le Quy Don Technical University  
ARTICLE INFO  
Received: 09/5/2021  
Revised: 28/5/2021  
Published: 31/5/2021  
ABSTRACT  
Today, drones are widely used for different purposes since they are  
not too expensive. Drones employed as explosive material, camera  
and illegal thing carriers can cause security threats. Computer vision  
can be applied to detect illegally acting drones effectively in a variety  
of conditions. A computer-based system using modern cameras is  
possible to discover small distant drones. The system can also become  
aware of low-speed and non-ground controlled drones. Furthermore,  
the system can display true drones. This makes the system friendly to  
users. This paper proposes a hybrid approach combining two  
emerging convolutional neural networks: Faster R-CNN and  
YOLOv2 to detect drones in images. Experimental results show that  
the approach can add up to almost 5% and more than 11% to  
precision and recall for Faster R-CNN and add up to 3% and more  
than 6% to these two metrics for YOLOv2. This better detection is  
resulted from the combination of the two networks. If a network is  
failed to detect drones in an image, the other network can help.  
KEYWORDS  
Machine learning  
Computer vision  
Convolutional Neural Network  
Faster R-CNN and YOLO  
Drone detection  
KẾT HỢP FASTER R-CNN VÀ YOLOv2 CHO VIỆC PHÁT HIỆN MÁY BAY  
KHÔNG NGƯỜI LÁI TRONG ẢNH  
Phạm Văn Việt  
Trường Đại học Kỹ thuật Lê Quý Đôn  
THÔNG TIN BÀI BÁO  
Ngày nhận bài: 09/5/2021  
Ngày hoàn thiện: 28/5/2021  
Ngày đăng: 31/5/2021  
TÓM TẮT  
Ngày nay, máy bay không người lái (drone) được sử dụng rộng rãi  
cho các mục đích khác nhau vì chúng không quá đắt. Các drone được  
sử dụng làm các phương tiện mang vật liệu nổ, máy ảnh và vật bất  
hợp pháp có thể gây ra các mối đe dọa an ninh. Thị giác máy tính có  
thể được áp dụng để phát hiện các drone hoạt động bất hợp pháp một  
cách hiệu quả trong nhiều điều kiện khác nhau. Một hệ thống dựa  
trên máy tính sử dụng các camera hiện đại có thể phát hiện ra các  
drone nhỏ ở xa. Hệ thống cũng có thể nhận biết được các drone tốc  
độ thấp và không được điều khiển từ mặt đất. Hơn nữa, hệ thống có  
thể hiển thị các drone thực sự. Điều này giúp hệ thống thân thiện với  
người dùng. Bài báo này đề xuất một cách tiếp cận lai kết hợp hai  
mạng nơ-ron tích chập mới nổi: Faster R-CNN và YOLOv2 để phát  
hiện các drone trong ảnh. Kết quả thử nghiệm cho thấy rằng phương  
pháp này có thể thêm tới gần 5% và hơn 11% cho độ chính xác và độ  
tái hiện cho Faster R-CNN và thêm tới 3% và hơn 6% cho hai chỉ số  
này cho YOLOv2. Việc phát hiện tốt hơn này là kết quả của sự kết  
hợp của hai mạng. Nếu một mạng không thể phát hiện các drone  
trong một bức ảnh, mạng khác có thể trợ giúp.  
TỪ KHÓA  
Học máy  
Thị giác máy tính  
Mạng nơ-ron tích chập  
Faster R-CNN và YOLO  
Phát hiện máy bay không người lái  
90  
TNU Journal of Science and Technology  
226(06): 90 - 96  
1. Introduction  
Today, drones are widely used for different purposes since they are not too expensive. Drones  
employed as explosive material, camera and illegal thing carriers can cause security threats.  
Discovering illegally acting drones can help to alert, prevent and track their operation.  
Different types of sensors such as RADAR, LIDAR, acoustic and RF (Radio Frequency)  
sensors can be used to detect drones as reviewed in [1], [2]. However, small and low-speed  
drones challenge RADAR. LIDAR is problematic with large data output and cloud sensitivity. A  
long operational range and noisy environment makes an acoustic sensor less effective. An RF  
sensor cannot work with non-ground controlled drones that are automatically navigated, based on  
a predefined route.  
Computer vision can be applied to detect illegally acting drones in a variety of conditions. A  
computer based system using modern cameras is possible to discover small distant drones. The  
system can also become aware of low-speed and non-ground controlled drones. Furthermore, the  
system can display true drones. This makes the system friendly to users. For these advantages,  
cameras are popularly integrated in modern drone detecting systems such as ND-BU001 [3] and  
DroneSentry [4].  
Drone detection using computer vision is to determine the existence of a drone and its location  
in an input image. A drone is located by its bounding box. The study in [2] provides a review of  
methods to solve this problem. Some researches [5], [6] first represent a drone by feature vectors  
that are extracted from a set of training images by feature descriptors such as SIFT (Scale  
Invariant Feature Transform), SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Features), HOG (Histogram of  
Oriented Gradients). A classifier (e.g. Support Vector Machine) trained on the extracted vectors  
is applied to detect drones on sliding windows in an input image. This method requires skillful  
extraction to acquire relevant information for detection. Furthermore, the sliding window  
technique causes computationally costly exhaustive search. In [5], CBCs (Cascades of Boosted  
Classifiers) are trained on Haar feature (feature achieved by Harr-like transformation), HOG  
feature and LBP (Local Binary Pattern) feature for drone detection. In [6], SURF feature and  
Neural Network are used for drone detection.  
The study in [7] first preprocesses an image by morphological operations to highlight  
potential drones. Then, hidden Markov models are employed to track and detect drones. The  
detection decision is made after target information is collected and collated over a period of time.  
The method in [8] partitions video into overlapping slices. Each slice contains N frames. The  
accuracy of drone detection can be improved by increasing the number of overlapping frames.  
Spatio-temporal cubes (st-cubes) with different scales for width, height and time duration are  
created by sliding window technique. A motion compensation algorithm is used for st-cutes to  
create st-cubes with a target object (drone) at center. Then, boosted trees or Convolutional Neural  
Networks (CNN) are employed to categorize each st-cute as containing a drone or not. If more  
than one drones are detected for the same spatial location at different scales, the most confident  
one is reserved.  
In [9], the Contiguous Outlier Representation via Online Low-rank Approximation  
(COROLA) technique is first employed for detecting the appearance of a small moving object in  
a frame and the CNN algorithm is applied for drone recognition.  
Deep neural networks in some studies are used as begin-to-end drone detection models.  
YOLOv2 [10] and YOLOv3 [11] are used in [12], [13], [1] and Faster R-CNN [14] is used in [2]  
for drone detection.  
In this paper, we propose a method combining two emerging convolutional neural networks:  
Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 to detect drones in images. They both have lower layers that are  
convolutional layers. These convolutional layers take an image as input and output feature maps.  
The feature maps are then inputs for object localization and classification.  
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TNU Journal of Science and Technology  
226(06): 90 - 96  
Faster R-CNN (for more detailed see [14]) joins the region proposal network RPN and the  
object detection network Fast R-CNN [15]. The two networks share convolutional layers. These  
layers have input of an image and output of feature maps. RPN takes the input image and  
produces region proposals and their objectness score. Region proposals are generated by sliding a  
small network with fully connected convolutional layers over the feature map. A spatial window  
of the feature map is taken as input for the small network. Each sliding window is mapped to a  
lower-dimensional feature. This feature is then taken as input for two sibling fully connected  
layers: a box-regression layer that outputs the encoded coordinates of k anchor boxes (also called  
anchors), and a box-classification layer that outputs 2-k scores estimating probability of object or  
not-object for each proposal. Fast R-CNN begins with convolutional and max pooling layers that  
take the input image and generate feature maps. Then, a region of interest (RoI) pooling layer  
uses max pooling to convert the features inside a region proposed by RPN into a small feature  
map with a fixed spatial extent. Next, fully connected layers map the small feature map to a  
feature vector. Finally, two fully connected sibling layers process the feature vector and outputs  
N bounding boxes with respect to N object classes and N+1 probability estimates for N object  
classes and background. A non-maximum suppression technique is independently used for each  
class to remove low confidence bounding boxes.  
YOLOv2 (for more detailed see [10]) also starts with convolutional and max pooling layers.  
These lower layers are trained to extract high-level features. Then, the features from the layers at  
the two highest levels are combined to get the final feature map of an input image. YOLOv2  
views the input image as a grid of SxS cells. Each grid cell is in relation with a set of anchor  
boxes. These anchor boxes’ centers are the same with the grid cell’s one. Their widths and  
heights are predefined by k-mean based on the objects’ dimensions in the training data so that  
these dimensions best present the objects’ dimensions. For each anchor box, YOLOv2 predicts a  
bounding box, a confidence score that reflects how confident the bounding box containing an  
object is, and conditional probabilities that the object belongs to classes. Then, low confidence  
bounding boxes are also filtered out as in Faster R-CNN.  
The difference between Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 is that Faster R-CNN proposes potential  
regions (containing objects) for classification and continues refining these regions while  
YOLOv2 preforms region detection and classification in just one time.  
The following sections include: section 2 presents the proposed method, section 3 presents the  
experiments and results of drone detection by Faster R-CNN, YOLOv2 and the proposed method,  
and the last section is about conclusion.  
2. Proposed method  
The proposed method in this paper is rooted from our observation that some drones in images  
are detected by YOLOv2 while they are not detected by Faster R-CNN and vice versa. The  
method combines Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 to detect drones so that when some drones are not  
detected by one network, they are detected by the other.  
shows the activity diagram of the proposed method. A rounded rectangle represents an  
activity. A rectangle describes an activity’s input or output data. A black circle represents the  
start node of the diagram. An encircled black circle denotes the end node of the diagram. A solid  
arrow represents a transition from one activity to another. A condition for a transition is written  
in square brackets. A dash arrow denotes a connection between an activity and its input or output  
data. A synchronization bar (a filled rectangle) indicates start or end of parallel activities. At first,  
Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 are trained separately for drone detection. The input of this step is  
training images and the ground truth bounding boxes of drones in the training images. The output  
of this step is Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 networks. Then, for each image taken from a set of  
testing images, the two networks are used to detect drones in parallel. This step produces the  
bounding boxes of detected drones and corresponding confidence scores. If Faster R-CNN’s  
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TNU Journal of Science and Technology  
226(06): 90 - 96  
minimum confidence score is greater than YOLOv2’s one or YOLOv2’s minimum confidence  
score is less than 0.5, then Faster’s R-CNN detection results are selected, otherwise YOLOv2’s  
ones are selected.  
Figure 1. Proposed method  
3. Experiments and results  
In this section, dataset for training and testing Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 networks for  
drone detection is first described. Parameters for training Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 are then  
presented. The experimental results of testing Faster R-CNN, YOLOv2 and the hybrid approach  
are presented at last.  
3.1. Training and testing dataset  
A dataset of 498 images of the quadcopter DJI Phantom 3 obtained from Google image search  
tool, and screenshots from videos from YouTube [16] were used for training and testing Faster  
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R-CNN and YOLOv2 network and testing the hybrid approach. Training data took 350 images  
and testing data took 148 images.  
The training data was augmented by randomly flipping original images and the bounding  
boxes horizontally at each iteration of a training epoch. This helps diversify the training data  
without having to increase the number of labeled training samples. The testing data was not  
augmented for unbiased evaluation. Figure 2 presents an original image (the left image) and its  
modified image (the right image) created by horizontal flip.  
Figure 2. Data augmentation  
3.2. Parameter settings  
The values of training parameters for Faster R-CNN were set as the best ones that were  
experimentally determined in [2]. These parameters include learning rate, momentum co-  
efficient, maximum number of epochs, IoU ranges for negative and positive anchor boxes at each  
sliding window position, number of images to sample mini-batchs, number of anchor boxes at  
each sliding window and pretrained network. IoU is the ratio of intersection over union of a  
ground truth bounding box and an anchor box. These training parameters were described detailed  
in [2]. Their values are shown in Table 1. Table 2 presents those for YOLOv2. These values were  
determined after several trials. YOLOv2 does not require IoU ranges for positive and negative  
anchor boxes as Faster R-CNN.  
Table 1. Faster R-CNN training parameters  
Parameter  
Value  
0.001  
0.09  
30  
Learning rate  
Momentum co-efficient  
Maximum number of epochs  
IoU range for negative anchors  
IoU range for positive anchors  
#images to sample mini-batches  
#anchor boxes  
[0 0.3]  
[0.6 1]  
1
10  
Pretrained network  
vgg19  
Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 were respectively trained with parameter settings in Table 1 and  
Table 2 by stochastic gradient descent. Then, Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 networks were  
combined as described in section 2 to detect drones in testing images.  
Table 2. YOLOv2 training parameters  
Parameter  
Value  
0.001  
0.9  
Learning rate  
Momentum co-efficient  
Maximum number of epochs  
#images to sample mini-batches  
#anchor boxes  
30  
5
7
Pretrained network  
resnet50  
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TNU Journal of Science and Technology  
226(06): 90 - 96  
3.3. Results  
We used precision and recall metrics on the whole set of test images to evaluate the proposed  
method, where the metrics were calculated as the following equations. TP, FP and FN are the  
numbers of true positives, false positives, and false negatives of the prediction on the whole set of  
testing images respectively. A positive detection is true if the ratio of intersection over union of  
its predicted box and a ground truth box is greater than or equal to 0.5, otherwise it is false. The  
number of false negatives is the number of drones that were not detected.  
푇푃  
(1)  
(2)  
푝푟푒푠푖표푛 =  
푟푒푐푎푙푙 =  
푇푃 + 퐹푃  
푇푃  
푇푃 + 퐹푁  
Table 3 shows the precisions and recalls of Faster R-CNN, YOLOv2 and the hybrid approach.  
We can see that the precision and recall of the hybrid approach are almost 5% and more than  
11% higher than those of Faster R-CNN, and are 3% and more than 6% higher than those of  
YOLOv2. This shows that Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 can work together to improve the  
accuracy of drone detection.  
Table 3. Precision and recall comparison between different methods  
Method  
Precision  
0.877  
0.896  
Recall  
0.796  
0.847  
0.908  
Faster R-CNN  
YOLOv2  
Proposed method  
0.926  
4. Conclusion  
In this paper, a hybrid method combining two emerging deep neural networks Faster R-CNN  
and YOLOv2 for drone detection was proposed. The two networks in the hybrid approach are  
first trained independently. Then, they are both used to detect drones in parallel. If the drone  
detection results of YOLOv2 are not confident, then those of Faster R-CNN are selected. The  
experimental results show that the hybrid approach can increase precision by almost 5% and 3%,  
and increase recall by more than 11% and 6% for Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 respectively. This  
shows that Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 can work together to more precisely detect drones.  
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