DSCW-YOLO: Vehicle Detection from Low-Altitude UAV Perspective via Coordinate Awareness and Collaborative Module Optimization

This paper proposes an optimized algorithm based on YOLOv11s to address the problem of insufficient detection accuracy of vehicle targets from a drone perspective due to certain scenes involving complex backgrounds, dense vehicle targets, and/or large variations in vehicle target scales due to oblique imaging. The proposed algorithm enhances the model's local feature extraction capability through a module collaboration optimization strategy, integrates coordinate convolution to strengthen spatial perception, and introduces a small object detection head to address target size variations caused by altitude changes. Additionally, we construct a dedicated dataset for urban vehicle detection that is characterized by high-resolution images, a large sample size, and low training resource requirements. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves gains of 1.9% in precision, 6.0% in recall, 4.2% in [email protected], and 3.3% in [email protected]:0.95 compared to the baseline network. The improved model also achieves the highest F1-score, indicating an optimal balance between precision and recall.