2025/12/12 by Lu, Yuncheng, Shi, Yucen, Li, Aobo +4
#Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.17939
We present an energy-efficient anti-UAV system that integrates frame-based and event-driven object tracking to enable reliable detection of small and fast-moving drones. The system reconstructs binary event frames using run-length encoding, generates region proposals, and adaptively switches between frame mode and event mode based on object size and velocity. A Fast Object Tracking Unit improves robustness for high-speed targets through adaptive thresholding and trajectory-based classification. The neural processing unit supports both grayscale-patch and trajectory inference with a custom instruction set and a zero-skipping MAC architecture, reducing redundant neural computations by more than 97 percent. Implemented in 40 nm CMOS technology, the 2 mm2 chip achieves 96 pJ per frame per pixel and 61 pJ per event at 0.8 V, and reaches 98.2 percent recognition accuracy on public UAV datasets across 50 to 400 m ranges and 5 to 80 pixels per second speeds. The results demonstrate state-of-the-art end-to-end energy efficiency for anti-UAV systems.