# A Comprehensive Approach for UAV Small Object Detection with Simulation-based Transfer Learning and Adaptive Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01800 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01800/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [Deep Visual Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03601/) (2018)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Benchmark for Large-scale Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07845/) (2018)
- [TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10794/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Head: Unifying Object Detection Heads with Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08322/) (2021)
- [YouTube-BoundingBoxes: A Large High-Precision Human-Annotated Data Set for Object Detection in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00824/) (2017)
- [M2Det: A Single-Shot Object Detector based on Multi-Level Feature Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04533/) (2018)
- [Augmentation for small object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07296/) (2019)
- [FSSD: Feature Fusion Single Shot Multibox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00960/) (2017)
- [Extended Feature Pyramid Network for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07021/) (2020)
- [A Deep Learning Approach to Drone Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00863/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Global-Local MAV Detection under Challenging Conditions based on Appearance and Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11008/) (2023)
- [DrIFT: Autonomous Drone Dataset with Integrated Real and Synthetic Data, Flexible Views, and Transformed Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04789/) (2024)
- [Domain Adaptive Detection of MAVs: A Benchmark and Noise Suppression Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16669/) (2024)
- [Motion-guided small MAV detection in complex and non-planar scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10527/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised UAV 3D Trajectories Estimation with Sparse Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12716/) (2024)
- [YOLOMG: Vision-based Drone-to-Drone Detection with Appearance and Pixel-Level Motion Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07115/) (2025)
- [Separating Drone Point Clouds From Complex Backgrounds by Cluster Filter -- Technical Report for CVPR 2024 UG2 Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16947/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Precisely detection of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) plays a critical role in UAV defense systems. Deep learning is widely adopted for UAV object detection whereas researches on this topic are limited by the amount of dataset and small scale of UAV. To tackle these problems, a novel comprehensive approach that combines transfer learning based on simulation data and adaptive fusion is proposed. Firstly, the open-source plugin AirSim proposed by Microsoft is used to generate mass realistic simulation data. Secondly, transfer learning is applied to obtain a pre-trained YOLOv5 model on the simulated dataset and fine-tuned model on the real-world dataset. Finally, an adaptive fusion mechanism is proposed to further improve small object detection performance. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of simulation-based transfer learning which leads to a 2.7% performance increase on UAV object detection. Furthermore, with transfer learning and adaptive fusion mechanism, 7.1% improvement is achieved compared to the original YOLO v5 model.