YOLOv11-SAFM: Enhancing Landslide Detection in Complex Mountainous Terrain Through Spatial Feature Adaptation

Landslide detection in mountainous regions remains highly challenging due to complex terrain conditions, heterogeneous surface textures, and the fragmented distribution of landslide features. To address these limitations, this study proposes an enhanced object detection framework named YOLOv11-SAFM, which integrates a Spatially Adaptive Feature Modulation (SAFM) module, an optimized MPDIoU-based bounding box regression loss, and a multi-scale training strategy. These improvements strengthen the model’s ability to detect small-scale landslides with blurred edges under complex geomorphic conditions. A high-resolution remote sensing dataset was constructed using imagery from Bijie and Zhaotong in southwest China including GF-2 optical imagery at 1 m resolution and Sentinel-2 data at 10 m resolution for model training and validation, while independent data from Zhenxiong County were used to assess generalization capability. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLOv11-SAFM achieves a precision of 95.05%, recall of 90.10%, F1-score of 92.51%, and [email protected] of 95.30% on the independent test set of the Zhaotong–Bijie dataset for detecting small-scale landslides in rugged plateau environments. Compared with the widely used Mask R-CNN, the proposed model improves precision by 13.87% and [email protected] by 15.7%; against the traditional YOLOv8, it increases recall by 27.0% and F1-score by 22.47%. YOLOv11-SAFM enables efficient and robust automatic landslide detection in complex mountainous terrains and shows strong potential for integration into operational geohazard monitoring and early warning systems.