Practical Approaches to Target Detection in Long Range and Low Quality Infrared Videos

It is challenging to detect vehicles in long range and low quality infrared videos using deep learning techniques such as You Only Look Once (YOLO) mainly due to small target size. This is because small targets do not have detailed texture information. This paper focuses on practical approaches for target detection in infrared videos using deep learning techniques. We first investigated a newer version of You Only Look Once (YOLO v4). We then proposed a practical and effective approach by training the YOLO model using videos from longer ranges. Experimental results using real infrared videos ranging from 1000 m to 3500 m demonstrated huge performance improvements. In particular, the average detection percentage over the six ranges of 1000 m to 3500 m improved from 54% when we used the 1500 m videos for training to 95% if we used the 3000 m videos for training.