Target Detection and Recognition for Traffic Congestion in Smart Cities Using Deep Learning-Enabled UAVs: A Review and Analysis

In smart cities, target detection is one of the major issues in order to avoid traffic congestion. It is also one of the key topics for military, traffic, civilian, sports, and numerous other applications. In daily life, target detection is one of the challenging and serious tasks in traffic congestion due to various factors such as background motion, small recipient size, unclear object characteristics, and drastic occlusion. For target examination, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an engaging solution due to their mobility, low cost, wide field of view, accessibility of trained manipulators, a low threat to people’s lives, and ease to use. Because of these benefits along with good tracking effectiveness and resolution, UAVs have received much attention in transportation technology for tracking and analyzing targets. However, objects in UAV images are usually small, so after a neural estimation, a large quantity of detailed knowledge about the objects may be missed, which results in a deficient performance of actual recognition models. To tackle these issues, many deep learning (DL)-based approaches have been proposed. In this review paper, we study an end-to-end target detection paradigm based on different DL approaches, which includes one-stage and two-stage detectors from UAV images to observe the target in traffic congestion under complex circumstances. Moreover, we also analyze the evaluation work to enhance the accuracy, reduce the computational cost, and optimize the design. Furthermore, we also provided the comparison and differences of various technologies for target detection followed by future research trends. © 2023 by the authors.