Efficient Feature Fusion for UAV Object Detection

Object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing images poses significant challenges due to unstable image quality, small object sizes, complex backgrounds, and environmental occlusions. Small objects, in particular, occupy small portions of images, making their accurate detection highly difficult. Existing multi-scale feature fusion methods address these challenges to some extent by aggregating features across different resolutions. However, they often fail to effectively balance the classification and localization performance for small objects, primarily due to insufficient feature representation and imbalanced network information flow. In this paper, we propose a novel feature fusion framework specifically designed for UAV object detection tasks to enhance both localization accuracy and classification performance. The proposed framework integrates hybrid upsampling and downsampling modules, enabling feature maps from different network depths to be flexibly adjusted to arbitrary resolutions. This design facilitates cross-layer connections and multi-scale feature fusion, ensuring improved representation of small objects. Our approach leverages hybrid downsampling to enhance fine-grained feature representation, improving spatial localization of small targets, even under complex conditions. Simultaneously, the upsampling module aggregates global contextual information, optimizing feature consistency across scales and enhancing classification robustness in cluttered scenes. Experimental results on two public UAV datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Integrated into the YOLO-v10 model, our method achieves a 2% improvement in average precision (AP) compared to the baseline YOLO-v10 model, while maintaining the same number of parameters. These results highlight the potential of our framework for accurate and efficient UAV object detection.

Xudong Wang, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen · 2025