FirePM-YOLO: Position-Enhanced Mamba for YOLO-Based Fire Rescue Object Detection from UAV Perspectives

Object detection in UAV-based fire rescue scenarios faces multiple challenges, including densely distributed small targets, severe occlusion, and interference from smoke and flames. Existing mainstream detection models, such as the YOLO series, often prioritize inference speed at the expense of modeling global context and spatial positional information, resulting in limited performance in such complex environments. To address these limitations, this paper proposes FirePM-YOLO, an object detection architecture optimized for fire rescue applications. Based on the YOLO framework, the proposed model introduces two key innovations: first, a Position-Aware Enhanced Mamba module (PEMamba) is designed, which incorporates a compact positional encoding mechanism, lightweight spatial enhancement, and an adaptive feature fusion strategy to significantly improve scene perception while maintaining computational efficiency. Second, a PEMBottleneck structure is constructed, which dynamically balances local convolutional features and global PEMamba features via learnable weights. This module is embedded into the shallow layers of the backbone network, forming an enhanced PEM-C3K2 module that captures long-range dependencies with linear complexity while preserving fine local details, thereby enabling holistic contextual understanding of fireground environments. Experimental results on the self-built “FireRescue” dataset demonstrate that compared with the original YOLOv12 and other mainstream detectors, the proposed model achieves improvements in both mean average precision (mAP) and recall while maintaining real-time inference capability. Notably, it exhibits superior detection performance on challenging samples, such as small-scale and partially occluded professional firefighting vehicles.