We propose a deep learning-based method for object detection in UAV-borne thermal images that have the capability of observing scenes in both day and night. Compared with visible images, thermal images have lower requirements for illumination conditions, but they typically have blurred edges and low contrast. Using a boundary-aware salient object detection network, we extract the saliency maps of the thermal images to improve the distinguishability. Thermal images are augmented with the corresponding saliency maps through channel replacement and pixel-level weighted fusion methods. Considering the limited computing power of UAV platforms, a lightweight combinational neural network ComNet is used as the core object detection method. The YOLOv3 model trained on the original images is used as a benchmark and compared with the proposed method. In the experiments, we analyze the detection performances of the ComNet models with different image fusion schemes. The experimental results show that the average precisions (APs) for pedestrian and vehicle detection have been improved by 2%~5% compared with the benchmark without saliency map fusion and MobileNetv2. The detection speed is increased by over 50%, while the model size is reduced by 58%. The results demonstrate that the proposed method provides a compromise model, which has application potential in UAV-borne detection tasks.

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Let $q=p^{e}$ be a prime power and $\ell$ be an integer with $0\leq \ell\leq e-1$. The $\ell$-Galois hull of classical linear codes is a generalization of the Euclidean hull and Hermitian hull. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which a codeword of a GRS code or an extended GRS code belongs to its $\ell$-Galois dual code, generalizing both the Euclidean case and Hermitian case in the literature. By using four different tools: 1) the norm mapping from $\mathbb{F}_{q}^{\ast}$ to $\mathbb{F}_{p^{\ell}}^{\ast}$; 2) the direct product of two cyclic subgroups; 3) the coset decomposition of a cyclic group; 4) an additive subgroup of $\mathbb{F}_{q}$ and its cosets, we construct eleven families of $q$-ary MDS codes with $\ell$-Galois hulls of arbitrary dimensions, and give the related eleven families of $[[n,k,d;c]]_{q}$ entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) with relatively large minimum distance in the sense that $2d=n-k+2+c$. We show that developing the theory of $\ell$-Galois hulls of $q$-ary MDS codes in this paper enables us to obtain new $q$-ary EAQECCs with different kinds of length sets via different $\ell$, where $2\ell\mid e$.