A2G-SRNet: An Adaptive Attention-Guided Transformer and Super-Resolution Network for Enhanced Aircraft Detection in Satellite Imagery

Accurate aircraft detection in remote sensing imagery is critical for aerospace surveillance, military reconnaissance, and aviation security but remains fundamentally challenged by extreme scale variations, arbitrary orientations, and dense spatial clustering in high-resolution scenes. This paper presents an adaptive attention-guided super-resolution network that integrates multi-scale feature learning with saliency-aware processing to address these challenges. Our architecture introduces three key innovations: (1) A hierarchical coarse-to-fine detection pipeline that first identifies potential regions in downsampled imagery before applying precision refinement, (2) A saliency-aware tile selection module employing learnable attention tokens to dynamically localize aircraft-dense regions without manual thresholds, and (3) A local tile refinement network combining transformer-based super-resolution for target regions with efficient upsampling for background areas. Extensive experiments on DIOR and FAIR1M benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving 93.1% AP₅₀ (DIOR) and 83.2% AP₅₀ (FAIR1M), significantly outperforming existing super-resolution-enhanced detectors. The proposed framework offers an adaptive sensing solution for satellite-based aircraft detection, effectively mitigating scale variations and background clutter in real-world operational environments.