Abstract: This paper addresses the urgent need to detect low, slow, and small (LSS) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complex and critical environments, proposing an active low-altitude target detection method based on the cat’s eye effect. The detection system incorporates a control module, a laser emission component, a co-optical path panoramic scanning optical mechanism structure, an echo reception component, target detection, and visualization processing to achieve small target detection. The light source is emitted by a near-infrared laser, and the scanning optical path is realized using micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) mirrors and servo mechanisms. The echo reception signal is received by an avalanche photodiode (APD) and the target detection module, which captures the reflected signal and distance information. The detection software integrates the local pyramid attention (LPA) module and the field pyramid network (FPN) through the UAV micro lens identification algorithm. It eliminates false alarms by incorporating SKNet21 and uses the APD to collect echo intensity and flight time, thereby reducing the false alarm rate. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed target detection method, which achieves a mean average precision of 0.809 at an intersection over union (IoU) of 0.50, a mean average precision of 0.324 at an IoU of 0.50–0.95, and a throughput of 49.8 Giga floating-point operations per second (GFLOPs), indicating that it can address the current limitations in LSS target detection.

Key words: Low-altitude detection; Optical path detection; Cat’s eye effect; SKNet21; Local pyramid attention; Average precision

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