An Efficient Rep-Style Gaussian–Wasserstein Network: Improved UAV Infrared Small Object Detection for Urban Road Surveillance and Safety

Owing to the significant application potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and infrared imaging technologies, researchers from different fields have conducted numerous experiments on aerial infrared image processing. To continuously detect small road objects 24 h/day, this study proposes an efficient Rep-style Gaussian–Wasserstein network (ERGW-net) for small road object detection in infrared aerial images. This method aims to resolve problems of small object size, low contrast, few object features, and occlusions. The ERGW-net adopts the advantages of ResNet, Inception net, and YOLOv8 networks to improve object detection efficiency and accuracy by improving the structure of the backbone, neck, and loss function. The ERGW-net was tested on a DroneVehicle dataset with a large sample size and the HIT-UAV dataset with a relatively small sample size. The results show that the detection accuracy of different road targets (e.g., pedestrians, cars, buses, and trucks) is greater than 80%, which is higher than the existing methods.