ECascade-RCNN: Enhanced Cascade RCNN for Multi-scale Object Detection in UAV Images

Due to the change of flight altitude and attitude of UAV, the object scale in UAV images exists difference which leads to a great challenge for object detection and has drawn wide attention. In this paper, an improved object detection network named ECascade-RCNN is proposed to deal with the multi-scale problem in object detection task for UAV images. We present an innovative Trident-FPN backbone to extract features and design a new attention mechanism to enhance the performance of the detector. Moreover, k-means algorithm is adapted to generate anchors so that the detection model can get better regression accuracy. We evaluate the proposed ECascade-R-CNN on Visdrone dataset through several ablation experiments and the results show that the ECascade-RCNN given in the paper is effective. The ECascade-RCNN is also used in the Visdrone2020 challenge and ranked 8th on the object detection track.