MD-YOLO: An Improved YOLO26-Based Model for Small-Object Detection in UAV Aerial Imagery

Object detection in UAV aerial imagery plays a vital role in applications such as traffic surveillance, urban management, and low-altitude inspection. However, aerial images typically present challenges including small object scales, dense distributions, severe occlusion, and cluttered backgrounds. Existing YOLO-series detectors still exhibit limitations in small-object feature representation, multi-scale contextual modeling, and downsampling detail preservation. To address these issues, this paper proposes MD-YOLO, an improved object detection model tailored for UAV scenarios, built upon the YOLO26 baseline. MD-YOLO incorporates three lightweight modules—IMO, DS-SPPF, and HPConv to optimize backbone feature extraction, multi-scale contextual aggregation, and Neck downsampling, respectively, thereby enhancing the model’s detection capability for small objects in complex UAV scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the baseline model, MD-YOLO achieves improvements of 3.9, 3.2, 2.9, and 3.1 percentage points in Precision, Recall, mAP50, and mAP50-95 on the VisDrone-2019 dataset, while maintaining a parameter count of only 9.3 M, thereby striking a favorable balance between accuracy and complexity. Independent evaluations on the UAVDT and NWPU VHR-10 datasets further confirm the consistent effectiveness of the model across diverse UAV imaging conditions, with mAP50 improvements of 8.3 and 1.4 percentage points, respectively.