A Lightweight Small Target Detection Algorithm for UAV Platforms

The targets in the aerial view of UAVs are small, scenes are complex, and background noise is strong. Additionally, the low computational capability of UAVs is challenged when trying to meet the requirements of large neural networks. Therefore, a lightweight object detection algorithm tailored for UAV platforms, called RSG-YOLO, is proposed. The algorithm introduces an attention module constructed with receptive field attention and coordinate attention, which helps reduce background noise interference while improving long-range information dependency. It also introduces and refines a fine-grained downsampling structure to minimize the loss of target information during the downsampling process. A general efficient layer aggregation network enhances the base feature extraction module, improving gradient flow information. Additionally, a detection layer rich in small target information is added, while redundant large object detection layers are removed, achieving a lightweight design while enhancing detection accuracy. Experimental results show that, compared to the baseline algorithm, the improved algorithm increases the P, R, [email protected], and [email protected]:0.95 by 6.9%, 7.2%, 8.4%, 5.8%, respectively, on the VisDrone 2019 dataset, and by 5.7%, 9%, 9.3%, 3.6%, respectively, on the TinyPerson dataset, while reducing the number of parameters by 23.3%. This significantly enhances the model’s detection performance and robustness, making it highly suitable for object detection tasks on low-computing-power UAV platforms.