EMWMS-YOLO: Efficient Multi-Scale Detection Framework for Small Objects in Challenging Remote Sensing Scenes

Nowadays, remote sensing images are characterized by significant scale variations, a high density of small targets, and complex background conditions, which pose substantial challenges for small-object detection. To address these issues, we propose EMWMS-YOLO, a lightweight and efficient detection framework built upon YOLOv11n. Specifically, an Efficient Multi-Scale Cross-Layer Extraction (EMSCLE) backbone is designed by integrating the Dual-Branch Feature Extraction (DBFE), Multi-Scale Feature Perception (MSFP), and Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast with Large Separable Kernel Attention (SPPF-LSKA) modules, enabling effective multi-scale feature extraction and cross-channel interaction. Furthermore, a Multi-Scale Adaptive Feature Fusion (MSAFF) neck architecture, composed of the Channel-Enhanced Convolution (CEC) and Multi-Scale Gated Feature Fusion (MSGFF) modules, is introduced to dynamically fuse cross-scale features and enhance salient target responses while suppressing background noise. In addition, the WaveletPool module replaces conventional pooling operations to reduce information loss and feature aliasing while preserving structural details. A Detect-MultiSEAM detection head is constructed by embedding a multi-scale spatial enhancement attention mechanism, which improves feature representation under complex conditions and reduces missed detections and false positives. Finally, the ShapeIoU loss function is employed to better model geometric and morphological properties, thereby improving localization accuracy. Experimental results on the VEDAI and NWPU-VHR-10 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves improvements of 9.8% and 4.1% in mAP50 over the YOLOv11n baseline, respectively, verifying its effectiveness in small-object detection.