A Real-Time Tracking Algorithm for Multi-Target UAV Based on Deep Learning

UAV technology is a basic technology aiming to help realize smart living and the construction of smart cities. Its vigorous development in recent years has also increased the presence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in people’s lives, and it has been increasingly used in logistics, transportation, photography and other fields. However, the rise in the number of drones has also put pressure on city regulation. Using traditional methods to monitor small objects flying slowly at low altitudes would be costly and ineffective. This study proposed a real-time UAV tracking scheme that uses the 5G network to transmit UAV monitoring images to the cloud and adopted a machine learning algorithm to detect and track multiple targets. Aiming at the difficulties in UAV detection and tracking, we optimized the network structure of the target detector yolo4 (You Only Look Once V4) and improved the target tracker DeepSORT, adopting the detection-tracking mode. In order to verify the reliability of the algorithm, we built a data set containing 3200 pictures of four UAVs in different environments, conducted training and testing on the model, and achieved 94.35% tracking accuracy and 69FPS detection speed under the GPU environment. The model was then deployed on ZCU104 to prove the feasibility of the scheme.