Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Anomaly Detection Based on Causality-Enhanced Graph Neural Networks
Chen Feng, Jun Fan, Zhiliang Liu, Guang Jin, Siya Chen
Abstract
With the widespread application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the safety detection system of UAVs has created an urgent need for anomaly detection technology. As a direct representation of system health status, flight data contain critical status information, driving data-driven methods to gradually replace traditional dynamic modeling as the mainstream paradigm. The former effectively circumvent the problems of nonlinear coupling and parameter uncertainty in complex dynamic modeling. However, data-driven methods still face two major challenges: the scarcity of anomalous flight data and the difficulty in extracting strong spatio-temporal coupling among flight parameters. To address these challenges, we propose an unsupervised anomaly detection method based on the causality-enhanced graph neural network (CEG). CEG innovatively introduces a causality model among flight parameters, achieving targeted extraction of spatial features through a causality-enhanced graph attention mechanism. Furthermore, CEG incorporates a trend-decomposed temporal feature extraction module to capture temporal dependencies in high-dimensional flight data. A low-rank regularization training paradigm is designed for CEG, and a residual adaptive bidirectional smoothing strategy is employed to eliminate the influence of noise. Experimental results on the ALFA dataset demonstrate that CEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of Precision, Recall, and F1 score. The proposed method enables accurate and robust anomaly detection on a wide range of anomaly types such as engines, rudders, and ailerons, validating its effectiveness in handling the unique challenges of UAV anomaly detection.