A Study on Realtime Drone Object Detection Using On-board Deep Learning

This paper provides a process for developing deep learning-based aerial object detection models that can run in realtime on onboard. To improve object detection performance, we pre-process and augment the training data in the training stage. In addition, we perform transfer learning and apply a weighted cross-entropy method to reduce the variations of detection performance for each class. To improve the inference speed, we have generated inference acceleration engines with quantization. Then, we analyze the real-time performance and detection performance on custom aerial image dataset to verify generalization.