Small UAV Target Detection Algorithm Using the YOLOv8n-RFL Based on Radar Detection Technology

To improve the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) detection and recognition rate based on radar detection technology, this paper proposes to take the radar range-Doppler planar graph that characterizes the echo information of the UAV as the input of the improved YOLOv8 network, uses the YOLOv8n-RFL network to detect and identify the UAV target. In the detection method of the UAV target, first, we detect the echo signal of the UAV through radar, and take the received echo model as the foundation, utilize the principle of generating range-Doppler planar data to convert the received UAV echo signals into range-Doppler planar graphs, and then, use the improved YOLOv8 network to train and detect the UAV target. In the detection algorithm, the range-Doppler planar graph is taken as the input of the YOLOv8n backbone network, the UAV target is extracted from the complex background through the C2f-RVB and C2f-RVBE modules to obtain more feature maps containing multi-scale UAV feature information; the shallow features from the backbone network and deep features from the neck network are integrated through the feature semantic fusion module (FSFM) to generate high-quality fused UAV feature maps with rich details and deep semantic information, and then, the lightweight sharing detection head (LWSD) is utilized to conduct unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) feature recognition based on the generated fused feature map. By detecting the collected echo data of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), it was found that the proposed improved algorithm can effectively detect the UAV.