Infrared target detection is a popular applied field in object detection as well as a challenge. This paper proposes the focus and attention mechanism-based YOLO (FA-YOLO), which is an improved method to detect the infrared occluded vehicles in the complex background of remote sensing images. Firstly, we use GAN to create infrared images from the visible datasets to make sufficient datasets for training as well as using transfer learning. Then, to mitigate the impact of the useless and complex background information, we propose the negative sample focusing mechanism to focus on the confusing negative sample training to depress the false positives and increase the detection precision. Finally, to enhance the features of the infrared small targets, we add the dilated convolutional block attention module (dilated CBAM) to the CSPdarknet53 in the YOLOv4 backbone. To verify the superiority of our model, we carefully select 318 infrared occluded vehicle images from the VIVID-infrared dataset for testing. The detection accuracy-mAP improves from 79.24% to 92.95%, and the F1 score improves from 77.92% to 88.13%, which demonstrates a significant improvement in infrared small occluded vehicle detection.
FA-YOLO: An Improved YOLO Model for Infrared Occlusion Object Detection under Confusing Background
