AeroLight: A Lightweight Architecture with Dynamic Feature Fusion for High-Fidelity Small-Target Detection in Aerial Imagery

Small-target detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial images remains a significant and unresolved challenge in aerial image analysis, hampered by low target resolution, dense object clustering, and complex, cluttered backgrounds. In order to cope with these problems, we present AeroLight, a novel and efficient detection architecture that achieves high-fidelity performance in resource-constrained environments. AeroLight is built upon three key innovations. First, we have optimized the feature pyramid at the architectural level by integrating a high-resolution head specifically designed for minute object detection. This design enhances sensitivity to fine-grained spatial details while streamlining redundant and computationally expensive network layers. Second, a Dynamic Feature Fusion (DFF) module is proposed to adaptively recalibrate and merge multi-scale feature maps, mitigating information loss during integration and strengthening object representation across diverse scales. Finally, we enhance the localization precision of irregular-shaped objects by refining bounding box regression using a Shape-IoU loss function. AeroLight is shown to improve mAP50 and mAP50-95 by 7.5% and 3.3%, respectively, on the VisDrone2019 dataset, while reducing the parameter count by 28.8% when compared with the baseline model. Further validation on the RSOD dataset and Huaxing Farm Drone dataset confirms its superior performance and generalization capabilities. AeroLight provides a powerful and efficient solution for real-world UAV applications, setting a new standard for lightweight, high-precision object recognition in aerial imaging scenarios.