Skyshield: Event-Driven Submillimetre Thin Obstacle Detection for Drone Flight Safety
This addresses a critical safety issue for drones operating in complex environments, though it is an incremental improvement in obstacle detection methods.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting submillimeter-scale thin obstacles like wires and kite strings for drone flight safety, which conventional sensors struggle with, and achieves a mean F1 Score of 0.7088 with a latency of 21.2 ms using an event-driven framework.
Drones operating in complex environments face a significant threat from thin obstacles, such as steel wires and kite strings at the submillimeter level, which are notoriously difficult for conventional sensors like RGB cameras, LiDAR, and depth cameras to detect. This paper introduces SkyShield, an event-driven, end-to-end framework designed for the perception of submillimeter scale obstacles. Drawing upon the unique features that thin obstacles present in the event stream, our method employs a lightweight U-Net architecture and an innovative Dice-Contour Regularization Loss to ensure precise detection. Experimental results demonstrate that our event-based approach achieves mean F1 Score of 0.7088 with a low latency of 21.2 ms, making it ideal for deployment on edge and mobile platforms.