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Open AccessArticle
A Progressive Target-Aware Network for Drone-Based Person Detection Using RGB-T Images
by
Zhipeng He
Zhipeng He 1,2,
Boya Zhao
Boya Zhao
Dr. Boya Zhao was born in 1990. He received his B.S. degree in electronic information engineering of [...]
Dr. Boya Zhao was born in 1990. He received his B.S. degree in electronic information engineering from the School of Electrical Engineering and Information, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China, in 2013, and his Ph.D. degree in information and communication engineering from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2019. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Key Laboratory of Computational Optical Imaging Technology, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. His research interests include object detection in complex backgrounds and onboard real-time information processing.
2
,
Yuanfeng Wu
Yuanfeng Wu
Dr. Yuanfeng Wu received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from the China University a [...]
Dr. Yuanfeng Wu received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from the China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing, China, in 2004 and 2007, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in cartography and geographical information systems from the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, in 2010. He is currently a Professor with the Key Laboratory of Computational Optical Imaging Technology, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. His research interests include the development of onboard real-time algorithms, high-performance computing implementation, and computer software in hyperspectral image processing.
2,*
,
Yuyang Jiang
Yuyang Jiang 2,3 and
Qingzhan Zhao
Qingzhan Zhao 4
1
School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
2
Key Laboratory of Computational Optical Imaging Technology, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
3
School of Optoelectronics, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
4
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shihezi University, Shihezi 832000, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Remote Sens. 2025, 17(19), 3361; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17193361 (registering DOI)
Submission received: 14 August 2025
/
Revised: 24 September 2025
/
Accepted: 2 October 2025
/
Published: 4 October 2025
Abstract
Drone-based target detection using visible and thermal (RGB-T) images is critical in disaster rescue, intelligent transportation, and wildlife monitoring. However, persons typically occupy fewer pixels and exhibit more varied postures than vehicles or large animals, making them difficult to detect in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing images with complex backgrounds. We propose a novel progressive target-aware network (PTANet) for person detection using RGB-T images. A global adaptive feature fusion module (GAFFM) is designed to fuse the texture and thermal features of persons. A progressive focusing strategy is used. Specifically, we incorporate a person segmentation auxiliary branch (PSAB) during training to enhance target discrimination, while a cross-modality background mask (CMBM) is applied in the inference phase to suppress irrelevant background regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PTANet achieves high accuracy and generalization performance, reaching 79.5%, 47.8%, and 97.3% mean average precision (mAP)@50 on three drone-based person detection benchmarks (VTUAV-det, RGBTDronePerson, and VTSaR), with only 4.72 M parameters. PTANet deployed on an embedded edge device with TensorRT acceleration and quantization achieves an inference speed of 11.177 ms (640 × 640 pixels), indicating its promising potential for real-time onboard person detection. The source code is publicly available on GitHub.
Share and Cite
MDPI and ACS Style
He, Z.; Zhao, B.; Wu, Y.; Jiang, Y.; Zhao, Q.
A Progressive Target-Aware Network for Drone-Based Person Detection Using RGB-T Images. Remote Sens. 2025, 17, 3361.
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17193361
AMA Style
He Z, Zhao B, Wu Y, Jiang Y, Zhao Q.
A Progressive Target-Aware Network for Drone-Based Person Detection Using RGB-T Images. Remote Sensing. 2025; 17(19):3361.
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17193361
Chicago/Turabian Style
He, Zhipeng, Boya Zhao, Yuanfeng Wu, Yuyang Jiang, and Qingzhan Zhao.
2025. "A Progressive Target-Aware Network for Drone-Based Person Detection Using RGB-T Images" Remote Sensing 17, no. 19: 3361.
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17193361
APA Style
He, Z., Zhao, B., Wu, Y., Jiang, Y., & Zhao, Q.
(2025). A Progressive Target-Aware Network for Drone-Based Person Detection Using RGB-T Images. Remote Sensing, 17(19), 3361.
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17193361
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