YOLO-RAW: Advancing UAV Detection With Robustness to Adverse Weather Conditions

With the widespread adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in various applications (e.g., aerial transportation, traffic monitoring), there have been apprehensions regarding the associated risks of employing UAVs in both civilian and military contexts, including concerns about privacy infringement, safety issues, and security threats. Although several methods have been proposed to detect UAVs, a pressing open challenge is posed by varying adverse weather conditions that could degrade the performance of many existing methods. To address these limitations, this work proposes a YOLO-based (You Only Look Once) novel model, YOLO-RAW that exhibits improved performance in adverse weather conditions and considers different scales of UAVs. Furthermore, to facilitate a more comprehensive evaluation of the proposed model’s effectiveness in UAV detection, we have curated a complex background dataset and introduced three distinct test sets affected by adverse weather conditions. These three test sets comprise the Rainy Test Set (RTS), the AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise) Test Set (ATS), and the Motion Blurred Test Set (MBTS). The comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed YOLO-RAW model over its counterparts in detecting UAVs under adverse conditions.