YOLO-Highway: An Improved Highway Center Marking Detection Model for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Autonomous Flight

Automatic visual navigation flight of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) plays an important role in the highway maintenance field. Automatic highway center marking detection is the most important part of the visual navigation flight of a UAV. In this study, the UAV-viewed highway data are collected from the UAV perspective. This paper proposes a model named the YOLO-Highway that uses an improved form of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) model to enhance the real-time detection of highway marking problems. The proposed model is mainly designed by optimizing the network structure and the loss function of the original YOLOv3 model. The proposed model is verified by the experiments using the highway center marking dataset, and the results show that the average precision (AP) of the trained model is 82.79%, and the frames per second (FPS) is 25.71 f/s. In comparison with the original YOLOv3 model, the detection accuracy of the proposed model is improved by 7.05%, and its speed is improved by 5.29 f/s. Moreover, the proposed model had stronger environmental adaptability and better detection precision and speed than the original model in complex highway scenarios. The experimental results show that the proposed YOLO-Highway model can accurately detect the highway center markings in real-time and has high robustness to changes in different environmental conditions. Therefore, the YOLO-Highway model can meet the real-time requirements of the highway center marking detection.