Security Fence Inspection at Airports Using Object Detection

Nils Friederich, Andreas Specker; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2024, pp. 310-319

To ensure the security of airports, it is essential to protect the airside from unauthorized access. For this purpose, security fences are commonly used, but they require regular inspection to detect damages. However, due to the growing shortage of human specialists and the large manual effort, there is the need for automated methods. The aim is to automatically inspect the fence for damage with the help of an autonomous robot. In this work, we explore object detection methods to address the fence inspection task and localize various types of damages. In addition to evaluating four state-of-the-art object detection models, we analyze the impact of several design criteria, aiming at adapting to the task-specific challenges. This includes contrast adjustment, optimization of hyperparameters, and utilization of modern backbones. The experimental results indicate that our optimized YOLOv5 model achieves the highest accuracy of the four methods with an increase of 6.9% points in AP compared to the baseline. Moreover, we show the real-time capability of the model. The trained models are published on GitHub: https://github.com/N-Friederich/airport_fence_inspection.