A Dual-Branch Perception Network for High-Precision Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing

With the rapid evolution of remote sensing earth observation technology, high-resolution object detection is crucial in military and civilian domains but faces challenges from expansive views and complex backgrounds. Small objects are particularly challenging due to their low pixel coverage, poor textures, and susceptibility to drastic illumination changes and background clutter. To address these problems, this paper proposes MDCA-YOLO for oriented object detection. A Dual-Branch Perception Module (DBPM) is designed utilizing a synergistic mechanism of large-kernel and strip convolutions to establish long-range dependencies, accurately capturing geometric features of tiny objects even in the absence of local details; Multi-Adaptive Selection Fusion (MASF) is proposed to address cross-scale feature loss by adaptively enhancing feature response while suppressing background noise; furthermore, a reconstructed decoupled detection head, CoordAttOBB, significantly improves angle regression accuracy while reducing complexity. Experimental results on the DIOR-R dataset show MDCA-YOLO surpasses YOLO11s, improving mAP50 and mAP50:95 by 2.5% and 2.7%, respectively, effectively proving the algorithm’s superiority in remote sensing tasks.