# HierLight-YOLO: A Hierarchical and Lightweight Object Detection Network for UAV Photography Source: [HierLight-YOLO: A Hierarchical and Lightweight Object Detection Network for UAV Photography]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T05:45:26.405Z Authors: Defan Chen, Yaohua Hu, Luchan Zhang Published: 2025-09-26T13:59:02.000Z ## Abstract The real-time detection of small objects in complex scenes, such as the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photography captured by drones, has dual challenges of detecting small targets (\<32 pixels) and maintaining real-time efficiency on resource-constrained platforms. While YOLO-series detectors have achieved remarkable success in real-time large object detection, they suffer from significantly higher false negative rates for drone-based detection where small objects dominate, compared to large object scenarios. This paper proposes HierLight-YOLO, a hierarchical feature fusion and lightweight model that enhances the real-time detection of small objects, based on the YOLOv8 architecture. We propose the Hierarchical Extended Path Aggregation Network (HEPAN), a multi-scale feature fusion method through hierarchical cross-level connections, enhancing the small object detection accuracy. HierLight-YOLO includes two innovative lightweight modules: Inverted Residual Depthwise Convolution Block (IRDCB) and Lightweight Downsample (LDown) module, which significantly reduce the model's parameters and computational complexity without sacrificing detection capabilities. Small object detection head is designed to further enhance spatial resolution and feature fusion to tackle the tiny object (4 pixels) detection. Comparison experiments and ablation studies on the VisDrone2019 benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of HierLight-YOLO. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()