Robust Federated Learning for UAV Object Detection: A Joint Self-Distillation and Drift Compensation Approach

YU-HANGSUN SUN^1*Changnan Jiang²Zi-Yuan Zhang²Heqing Ouyang²Pengpeng Chen²

• ¹Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China
• ²Chinese Aeronautical Establishment, Beijing, China

The rapid advancement of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in disaster response and environmental monitoring has underscored the growing importance of real-time object detection within UAV swarm networks. However, the non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) characteristics of data in UAV networks present significant challenges to model convergence and adaptability. To tackle these challenges, this study introduces a robust federated UAV object detection framework tailored for non-IID data distributions. The framework aims to enhance adaptability across clients, thereby improving both detection performance and convergence speed. Our approach includes a self-distillation mechanism that leverages personalized knowledge from local model historical states to guide current local training, striking a balance between specialization and adaptability. Additionally, we propose a drift compensation mechanism to synchronize local and global model updates, mitigating model drift. We conducted extensive experiments on the VisDrone2019-DET dataset, comparing our method to baseline models. Results demonstrate that our approach accelerates convergence speed by approximately 2.2 times and enhances detection performance by around 3%, offering an efficient and robust solution for UAV-based object detection under non-IID conditions.