VDTNet: A High-Performance Visual Network for Detecting and Tracking of Intruding Drones

The misuse of drones can jeopardize public safety and privacy. The detection and catching of intruding drones are crucial and urgent issues to be investigated. This work proposes VDTNet, an accurate, lightweight, and fast network for visually detecting and tracking intruding drones. We first incorporate an SPP module into the first head of YOLOv4 to enhance detection accuracy. Model compression is utilized to shrink the model size and concurrently speed up inference. We then propose and insert an SPPS module and a ResNeck module into the neck, and introduce an effective attention module for the backbone to compensate for the accuracy drop brought on by compression. With the above strategies, we present the accurate and compact VDTNet with a model size of merely 3.9 MB, ensuring low computational cost and fast detection and tracking performance in real time. Extensive experiments on four challenging public datasets show that our proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. In real-world scenarios, the comparative ground-to-air detection testing proves the generalization ability of the VDTNet, and we further demonstrate the portability and practicability of the network by deploying it on drone onboard edge-computing devices for air-to-air real-time detection of the intruding drones.