Integrating Visual Geometry and Mask Region CNN for Enhanced UAV Detection and Identification

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been adopted in various applications, including agriculture, public safety, surveillance, and crucial military missions. However, alongside their advantageous nature, UAVs have also been employed for malicious activities, leading to an increased requirement for timely detection and identification. Despite significant progress in UAV detection, challenges persist, particularly concerning various types of UAVs, the payload carried by UAVs, and the traits of their flight. Employing single machine learning for detection and identification has limitations due to the inability to handle diverse datasets and acquire complex relationships. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel integration of the Visual Geometry Group-based convolutional neural network (VGG-CNN) framework employed for detection with the Mask Region-based convolutional neural network (MR-CNN) for identification of UAVs (jointly termed MR-DCNN). For efficient deployment of MR-DCNN, we add diversity to the dataset by performing data augmentation of new images in the training dataset for the detection of various types of UAVs, payload categories, and flight characteristics. The performance evaluation of the MR-DCNN approach was conducted via simulations, revealing superior detection capabilities for malicious UAVs compared to existing methods.