Airport Clearance Detection Based on Vision Transformer and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

With the improvement of the ecological environment and technology, the possibility of foreign object invasion over airports is increasing, which seriously affects the flight safety of aircraft. Most airports use independent bird repelling devices to drive away birds, but their effectiveness will gra...

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Main Authors: Yutong Chen, Yufen Liu, Zhixiong Guo, Qiang Gao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10931779/
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author Yutong Chen
Yufen Liu
Zhixiong Guo
Qiang Gao
author_facet Yutong Chen
Yufen Liu
Zhixiong Guo
Qiang Gao
author_sort Yutong Chen
collection DOAJ
description With the improvement of the ecological environment and technology, the possibility of foreign object invasion over airports is increasing, which seriously affects the flight safety of aircraft. Most airports use independent bird repelling devices to drive away birds, but their effectiveness will gradually deteriorate over time. In addition, these devices cannot effectively repel foreign objects such as drones. Therefore, a complete airport clearance system is needed, and the core part of this system is the airport clearance detection which requires accurate identification of birds, drones, and foreign objects in the airspace to ensure aviation safety. Faced with airport complex scenes and small object detection, there are still certain limitations to the traditional object detection algorithm. To overcome the defects in detection, this paper proposes an airport clearance detection algorithm based on Vision Transformer and multi-scale feature fusion to address the problems of poor real-time performance, low accuracy, and large parameter quantity in existing airport clearance detection systems. Firstly, to enrich the feature representation, replace the last C2f of the neck with C2fCIB. Secondly, to improve the feature extraction ability, partial convolution is replaced with dynamic convolution, and attention is introduced to the convolution kernel from four dimensions. Then, add the Vision Transformer module to capture more contextual information. Finally, improve the loss function to enhance the ability of bounding box regression processing. The experimental results show that the model achieves high detection accuracy which has reached mAP@0.5 at 93.7%, an improvement of 5.4% compared to YOLOv8n.
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spelling doaj-art-1fd43dcfc7a84bfe9700ebe7402dbded2025-08-20T01:50:22ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-0113518745189010.1109/ACCESS.2025.354942710931779Airport Clearance Detection Based on Vision Transformer and Multi-Scale Feature FusionYutong Chen0Yufen Liu1https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9168-8010Zhixiong Guo2Qiang Gao3School of Civil Aviation Electronic Information Engineering, Guangzhou Civil Aviation College, Guangzhou, Guangdong, ChinaSchool of Electrical Engineering, Guangzhou City University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, ChinaSchool of Electrical Engineering, Guangzhou City University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, ChinaSchool of Civil Aviation Electronic Information Engineering, Guangzhou Civil Aviation College, Guangzhou, Guangdong, ChinaWith the improvement of the ecological environment and technology, the possibility of foreign object invasion over airports is increasing, which seriously affects the flight safety of aircraft. Most airports use independent bird repelling devices to drive away birds, but their effectiveness will gradually deteriorate over time. In addition, these devices cannot effectively repel foreign objects such as drones. Therefore, a complete airport clearance system is needed, and the core part of this system is the airport clearance detection which requires accurate identification of birds, drones, and foreign objects in the airspace to ensure aviation safety. Faced with airport complex scenes and small object detection, there are still certain limitations to the traditional object detection algorithm. To overcome the defects in detection, this paper proposes an airport clearance detection algorithm based on Vision Transformer and multi-scale feature fusion to address the problems of poor real-time performance, low accuracy, and large parameter quantity in existing airport clearance detection systems. Firstly, to enrich the feature representation, replace the last C2f of the neck with C2fCIB. Secondly, to improve the feature extraction ability, partial convolution is replaced with dynamic convolution, and attention is introduced to the convolution kernel from four dimensions. Then, add the Vision Transformer module to capture more contextual information. Finally, improve the loss function to enhance the ability of bounding box regression processing. The experimental results show that the model achieves high detection accuracy which has reached mAP@0.5 at 93.7%, an improvement of 5.4% compared to YOLOv8n.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10931779/Foreign objectairport clearancetransformermultiscale fusiondetection
spellingShingle Yutong Chen
Yufen Liu
Zhixiong Guo
Qiang Gao
Airport Clearance Detection Based on Vision Transformer and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
IEEE Access
Foreign object
airport clearance
transformer
multiscale fusion
detection
title Airport Clearance Detection Based on Vision Transformer and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
title_full Airport Clearance Detection Based on Vision Transformer and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
title_fullStr Airport Clearance Detection Based on Vision Transformer and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
title_full_unstemmed Airport Clearance Detection Based on Vision Transformer and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
title_short Airport Clearance Detection Based on Vision Transformer and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
title_sort airport clearance detection based on vision transformer and multi scale feature fusion
topic Foreign object
airport clearance
transformer
multiscale fusion
detection
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10931779/
work_keys_str_mv AT yutongchen airportclearancedetectionbasedonvisiontransformerandmultiscalefeaturefusion
AT yufenliu airportclearancedetectionbasedonvisiontransformerandmultiscalefeaturefusion
AT zhixiongguo airportclearancedetectionbasedonvisiontransformerandmultiscalefeaturefusion
AT qianggao airportclearancedetectionbasedonvisiontransformerandmultiscalefeaturefusion