With the rapid growth of the global drone market, a variety of small drones have posed a certain threat to public safety. Therefore, we need to detect small drones in a timely manner so as to take effective countermeasures. At present, the method based on deep learning has made a great breakthrough in the field of target detection, but it is not good at detecting small drones. In order to solve the above problems, we proposed the IRSDD-YOLOv5 model, which is based on the current advanced detector YOLOv5. Firstly, in the feature extraction stage, we designed an infrared small target detection module (IRSTDM) suitable for the infrared recognition of small drones, which extracted and retained the target details to allow IRSDD-YOLOv5 to effectively detect small targets. Secondly, in the target prediction stage, we used the small target prediction head (PH) to complete the prediction of the prior information output via the infrared small target detection module (IRSTDM). We optimized the loss function by calculating the distance between the true box and the predicted box to improve the detection performance of the algorithm. In addition, we constructed a single-frame infrared drone detection dataset (SIDD), annotated at pixel level, and published an SIDD dataset publicly. According to some real scenes of drone invasion, we divided four scenes in the dataset: the city, sky, mountain and sea. We used mainstream instance segmentation algorithms (Blendmask, BoxInst, etc.) to train and evaluate the performances of the four parts of the dataset, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm demonstrates good performance. The $A{P}_{50}$ measurements of IRSDD-YOLOv5 in the mountain scene and ocean scene reached peak values of 79.8% and 93.4%, respectively, which are increases of 3.8% and 4% compared with YOLOv5. We also made a theoretical analysis of the detection accuracy of different scenarios in the dataset.

Images acquired by different sensors exhibit different characteristics because of the varied imaging mechanisms of sensors. The fusion of visible and infrared images is valuable for specific image applications. While infrared images provide stronger object features under poor illumination and smoke interference, visible images have rich texture features and color information about the target. This study uses dual optical fusion as an example to explore fusion detection methods at different levels and proposes a multimodal decision-level fusion detection method based on category probability sets (CPROS). YOLOv8—a single-mode detector with good detection performance—was chosen as the benchmark. Next, we innovatively introduced the improved Yager formula and proposed a simple non-learning fusion strategy based on CPROS, which can combine the detection results of multiple modes and effectively improve target confidence. We validated the proposed algorithm using the VEDAI public dataset, which was captured from a drone perspective. The results showed that the mean average precision (mAP) of YOLOv8 using the CPROS method was 8.6% and 16.4% higher than that of the YOLOv8 detection single-mode dataset. The proposed method significantly reduces the missed detection rate (MR) and number of false detections per image (FPPI), and it can be generalized.

In order to improve the UAV prevention and control capability in key areas and improve the rapid identification and trajectory prediction accuracy of the ground detection system in anti-UAV early warnings, an improved LSTM trajectory prediction network CA-LSTM (CNN-Attention-LSTM) based on attention enhancement and convolution fusion structure is proposed. Firstly, the native Yolov5 network is improved to enhance its detection ability for small targets of infrared UAVs, and the trajectory of UAVs in image space is constructed. Secondly, the LSTM network and convolutional neural network are integrated to improve the expression ability of the deep features of UAV trajectory data, and at the same time, the attention structure is designed to more comprehensively obtain time series context information, improve the influence on important time series features, and realize coarse–fine-grained feature fusion. Finally, tests were carried out on a homemade UAV infrared detection dataset. The experimental results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can quickly and accurately identify infrared UAV targets and can achieve more accurate predictions of UAV flight trajectories, which are reduced by 9.43% and 23.81% in terms of MAPE and MSE indicators compared with the native LSTM network (the smaller the values of these evaluation indexes, the better the prediction results).

Distributed beamforming has emerged as a pivotal technology in modern communication systems, radar applications, and collaborative electronic warfare. Through distributed collaboration, these jamming nodes composed of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can execute flexible electronic jamming toward wireless communication systems despite energy limitations. However, they encounter challenges such as time and positioning inaccuracies, which can diminish the synthesis power of jamming beams and reduce jamming effectiveness. This paper examines the impact of angle and distance errors on jamming effectiveness, deriving upper error bounds under various suppression coefficients. The findings offer practical guidelines for enhancing the precision and effectiveness of distributed beamforming systems in electronic warfare applications.

For visible and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image fusion, this paper proposes a visible and SAR image fusion algorithm based on a Transformer and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Firstly, in this paper, the Restormer Block is used to extract cross-modal shallow features. Then, we introduce an improved Transformer–CNN Feature Extractor (TCFE) with a two-branch residual structure. This includes a Transformer branch that introduces the Lite Transformer (LT) and DropKey for extracting global features and a CNN branch that introduces the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) for extracting local features. Finally, the fused image is output based on global features extracted by the Transformer branch and local features extracted by the CNN branch. The experiments show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively achieve the extraction and fusion of global and local features of visible and SAR images, so that high-quality visible and SAR fusion images can be obtained.