YOLO-G: A Lightweight Network Model for Improving the Performance of Military Targets Detection

Military target detection technology is the foundation and key to perceive and analyze the battlefield situation, and it is also the premise of target tracking technology. Aiming at the task of military target detection, the detection performance of traditional detection algorithms is poor in complex environment. We realized automatic detection of military targets in complex environment through deep learning. In this research, we improved the components of YOLOv3 and proposed a novel military target detection algorithm (YOLO-G). We have built a military target dataset composed of armed men with different weapons, which provides a test environment for various object detection algorithms. In the YOLOv3 network structure, by introducing the lightweight convolutional neural network GhostNet as the feature extraction network, the accuracy and speed of military target detection are improved. Then, the attention mechanism based on the coordinate attention block is introduced to enhance the representation ability of target features, suppress interference and improve the detection accuracy. Finally, the loss function of the target detector is redesigned by using DIOU loss function and Focal loss function, which further improves the detection accuracy of our detection model for military targets. We tested YOLO-G on the military target dataset. Experimental results show that our method improves the mAP by 2.9% and the detection speed by 25.9 frames/s compared with the original YOLOv3 algorithm, and the size of the proposed model is reduced to 1/6 of that of YOLOv3. In addition, we also compared our method with several state-of-the-art object detection algorithms. The results show that YOLO-G also has superior detection performance, and the mAP index obtained by our method is 1.2% higher than that of the latest YOLOv5 on the premise of meeting the application requirements. The improved network model can provide effective auxiliary technical support for battlefield situation generation and analysis.