Proceedings of 2022 National Symposium on System Science and Engineering 國立中興大學

National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, 26~29 May, 2022

Application of UAVs for Riverine Waste Detection and Image

Stitching

Chang-Hsun Chiang and Jih-Gau Juang

Department of Communications, Navigation and Control Engineering
National Taiwan Ocean University
E-mail: jgjuang@ntou.edu.tw

Abstract
This study integrates You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm and Scale-invariant
feature transform (SIFT) algorithm with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for riverine waste
detection and dynamic image stitching. The YOLO algorithm can improve the accuracy of
riverine waste identification. The images obtained from UAVs’ cameras are stitched through
the SIFT algorithm. The stitching results are sent to government officials to check waste
information from the real-time multi-camera stitching images via video streaming server. In
this study, firstly, we utilize a variety of algorithms to improve accuracy of riverine waste
identification. We use different algorithms to be our trash detector like YOLOv4-tiny and
YOLOv5. We also use data augmentation like mosaic to increase amount of data for training.
We have a collection of 2334 images and are labeled from two categories to one category.
Finally, we choose YOLOv5 to be our trash detector. In order to comply with OpenCV, SIFT
algorithm is used to stitch the images. The YOLOv5 integrates some feature of YOLOv3 and
YOLOv4. YOLOv5 adds the Focus structure in the backbone and uses modified PAN
structure from YOLOv4 to improve the speed and efficiency. We utilize SIFT algorithm to
stitch the images. The main advantages of SIFT algorithm are that small object also can
generate a lot of feature points and the algorithm can perform real-time computation. The
scale space of an image is a function that is produced from the convolution of a Gaussian
kernel at different scales with the input image. YOLOv5 was trained by the collected data. We
change training set to one class and modified the backbone structure. YOLOv5 can reach 76%
mAP and we found that confidence scores can be increased and false postive detection
occurred less frequently. Dynamic images from the cameras on the UAVs are successfully
stitched.

Keywords：UAV, deep learning, objection detection, image stitching.