Soft-NMS-Enabled YOLOv5 with SIOU for Small Water Surface Floater Detection in UAV-Captured Images

Abstract

In recent years, the protection and management of water environments have garnered heightened attention due to their critical importance. Detection of small objects in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images remains a persistent challenge due to the limited pixel values and interference from background noise. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an integrated object detection approach that utilizes an improved YOLOv5 model for real-time detection of small water surface floaters. The proposed improved YOLOv5 model effectively detects small objects by better integrating shallow and deep features and addressing the issue of missed detections and, therefore, aligns with the characteristics of the water surface floater dataset. Our proposed model has demonstrated significant improvements in detecting small water surface floaters when compared to previous studies. Specifically, the average precision (AP), recall (R), and frames per second (FPS) of our model achieved 86.3%, 79.4%, and 92%, respectively. Furthermore, when compared to the original YOLOv5 model, our model exhibits a notable increase in both AP and R, with improvements of 5% and 6.1%, respectively. As such, the proposed improved YOLOv5 model is well-suited for the real-time detection of small objects on the water’s surface. Therefore, this method will be essential for large-scale, high-precision, and intelligent water surface floater monitoring.