WCDB-YOLO: Wavelet-Enhanced Contextual Dual-Backbone Network for Small Object Detection in UAV Aerial Imagery

Object detection in UAV aerial imagery plays a pivotal role across a wide spectrum of applications. However, existing detection models continue to face significant challenges stemming from small object scales, dense spatial distributions, and highly complex backgrounds. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel dual-backbone network model named WCDB-YOLO. The core innovation of this work lies in introducing a “target-context decoupled perception” paradigm, which utilizes two structurally complementary backbone networks to separately process local object features and global background information: one backbone focuses on extracting fine-grained local features of objects, while the other innovatively incorporates a wavelet convolution module to efficiently model the global contextual semantics of complex scenes with minimal computational cost by constructing a large receptive field. To further enhance the scale adaptability for small objects, a Dilation-wise Residual (DWR) module is designed, which employs parallel convolutional branches with different dilation rates to achieve dynamic adaptation to multi-scale small object features. Additionally, the model optimizes the feature pyramid structure by integrating high-resolution P2/4 features into the detection head, significantly improving the localization accuracy of tiny objects. Experimental results on the VisDrone dataset show that the proposed method achieves an 8.4% improvement in mAP50 over the baseline YOLOv11s model and outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. This work presents a highly accurate and robust solution for small object detection from UAV platforms in complex environments.