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Drone-based object detection faces critical challenges, including tiny objects, complex urban backgrounds, dramatic scale variations, and high-frequency detail loss during feature propagation. Current detection methods struggle to address these challenges while maintaining computational efficiency effectively. We propose Scale-Frequency Detection Transformer (SF-DETR), a novel end-to-end framework for drone-view scenarios. SF-DETR introduces a lightweight ScaleFormerNet backbone with Dual Scale Vision Transformer modules, a Bilateral Interactive Feature Enhancement Module, and a Multi-Scale Frequency-Fused Feature Enhancement Network. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone2019 dataset demonstrate SF-DETR’s superior performance, achieving 51.0% mAP50 and 31.8% mAP50:95, surpassing state-of-the-art methods like YOLOv9m and RTDETR-r18 by 6.2% and 4.0%, respectively. Further validation of the HIT-UAV dataset confirms the model’s generalization capability. Our work establishes a new benchmark for drone-view object detection and provides lightweight architecture suitable for embedded device deployment in real-world aerial surveillance applications.

Benefiting from the advances in object detection in remote sensing, detecting objects in images captured by drones has achieved promising performance in recent years. However, drone-view object detection in rainy weather conditions (Rainy DroneDet) remains a challenge, as small-sized objects blurred by rain streaks offer a little valuable information for robust detection. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Deraining Network called “CoDerainNet”, which simultaneously and interactively trains a deraining subnetwork and a droneDet subnetwork to improve the accuracy of Rainy DroneDet. Furthermore, we propose a Collaborative Teaching paradigm called “ColTeaching”, which leverages rain-free features extracted by the Deraining Subnetwork and teaches the DroneDet Subnetwork such features, to remove rain-specific interference in features for DroneDet. Due to the lack of an existing dataset for Rainy DroneDet, we built three drone datasets, including two synthetic datasets, namely RainVisdrone and RainUAVDT, and one real drone dataset, called RainDrone. Extensive experiment results on the three rainy datasets show that CoDerainNet can significantly reduce the computational costs of state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detectors while maintaining detection performance comparable to these SOTA models.

Recently, the research on drone-view object detection (DOD) has predominantly centered on efficiently identifying objects through cropping high-resolution images. However, it has overlooked the distinctive challenges posed by scale imbalance and a higher prevalence of small objects in drone images. In this paper, to address the challenges associated with the detection of drones (DODs), we introduce a specialized detector called DroneNet. Firstly, we propose a feature information enhancement module (FIEM) that effectively preserves object information and can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play module into the backbone network. Then, we propose a split-concat feature pyramid network (SCFPN) that not only fuses feature information from different scales but also enables more comprehensive exploration of feature layers with many small objects. Finally, we develop a coarse to refine label assign (CRLA) strategy for small objects, which assigns labels from coarse- to fine-grained levels and ensures adequate training of small objects during the training process. In addition, to further promote the development of DOD, we introduce a new dataset named OUC-UAV-DET. Extensive experiments on VisDrone2021, UAVDT, and OUC-UAV-DET demonstrate that our proposed detector, DroneNet, exhibits significant improvements in handling challenging targets, outperforming state-of-the-art detectors.

Object detection plays a crucial role in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) missions, where captured objects are often small and require high-resolution processing. However, this requirement is always in conflict with limited computing resources, vast fields of view, and low latency requirements. To tackle these issues, we propose GA-Net, a novel approach tailored for UAV images. The key innovation includes the Grid Activation Module (GAM), which efficiently calculates grid activations, the probability of foreground presence at grid scale. With grid activations, the GAM helps filter out patches without objects, minimize redundant computations, and improve inference speeds. Additionally, the Grid-based Dynamic Sample Selection (GDSS) focuses the model on discriminating positive samples and hard negatives, addressing background bias during training. Further enhancements involve GhostFPN, which refines Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) using Ghost module and depth-wise separable convolution. This not only expands the receptive field for improved accuracy, but also reduces computational complexity. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on DGTA-Cattle-v2, a synthetic dataset with added background images, and three public datasets (VisDrone, SeaDronesSee, DOTA) from diverse domains. The results prove the effectiveness and practical applicability of GA-Net. Despite the common accuracy and speed trade-off challenge, our GA-Net successfully achieves a mutually beneficial scenario through the strategic use of grid activations.

Benefiting from the advancement of deep neural networks (DNNs), detecting objects from drone-view images has achieved great success in recent years. It is a very challenging task to deploy such DNN-based detectors on drones in real-life applications due to their excessive computational costs and limited onboard computational resources. Large redundant computation exists because existing drone-view detectors infer all inputs with nearly identical computation. Detectors with less complexity can be sufficient for a large portion of inputs, which contain a small number of sparse distributed large-size objects. Therefore, a drone-view detector supporting input-aware inference, i.e., capable of dynamically adapting its architecture to different inputs, is highly desirable. In this work, we present a Dynamic Context Collection Network (DyCC-Net), which can perform input-aware inference by dynamically adapting its structure to inputs of different levels of complexities. DyCC-Net can significantly improve inference efficiency by skipping or executing a context collector conditioned on the complexity of the input images. Furthermore, since the weakly supervised learning strategy for computational resource allocation lacks of supervision, models may execute the computationally-expensive context collector even for easy images to minimize the detection loss. We present a Pseudo-label-based semi-supervised Learning strategy (Pseudo Learning), which uses automatically generated pseudo labels as supervision signals, to determine whether to perform context collector according to the input. Extensive experiment results on VisDrone2021 and UAVDT, show that our DyCC-Net can detect objects in drone-captured images efficiently. The proposed DyCC-Net reduces the inference time of state-of-the-art (SOTA) drone-view detectors by over 30 percent, and DyCC-Net outperforms them by 1.94% in AP75.

Foreign objects such as balloons and nests often lead to widespread power outages by coming into contact with transmission lines. The manual detection of these is labor-intensive work. Automatic foreign object detection on transmission lines is a crucial task for power safety and is becoming the mainstream method, but the lack of datasets is a restriction. In this paper, we propose an advanced model termed YOLOv8 Network with Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (YOLOv8_BiFPN) to detect foreign objects on power transmission lines. Firstly, we add a weighted cross-scale connection structure to the detection head of the YOLOv8 network. The structure is bidirectional. It provides interaction between low-level and high-level features, and allows information to spread across feature maps of different scales. Secondly, in comparison to the traditional concatenation and shortcut operations, our method integrates information between different scale features through weighted settings. Moreover, we created a dataset of Foreign Object detection on Transmission Lines from a Drone-view (FOTL_Drone). It consists of 1495 annotated images with six types of foreign object. To our knowledge, FOTL_Drone stands out as the most comprehensive dataset in the field of foreign object detection on transmission lines, which encompasses a wide array of geographic features and diverse types of foreign object. Experimental results showcase that YOLOv8_BiFPN achieves an average precision of 90.2% and an mAP@.50 of 0.896 across various categories of foreign objects, surpassing other models.

Existing object detection methods remain severely challenged by adverse weather and domain shifts. On the one hand, the significant distribution shift between clean and degraded samples under diverse weather conditions prevents models from robustly learning intrinsic object representations. On the other hand, drones are distant from objects, and even slight degradation may lead to significant loss of details. There is a lack of a unified and effective all‐weather detection framework. To this end, a unified object detection method with degradation‐aware and domain adaptive modeling is proposed. First, we design a degradation‐aware module (DAM) that leverages amplitude characteristics in the frequency domain to explicitly model degradation patterns, enabling the detector to perceive various types of image quality deterioration. Second, we propose a domain‐aware attention‐based restoration expert system (DA‐RES). It disentangles shared and domain‐specific representations through a combination of domain‐shared and domain‐specific encoders, thereby suppressing category‐irrelevant information while enhancing domain‐specific useful cues. Finally, through embedding the degradation patterns identified by DAM into the target domain encoder, DA‐RES performs multiscale feature restoration guided by degradation priors, thereby boosting downstream detection tasks against adverse conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves robust detection performance under all‐weather conditions, particularly in challenging degraded scenarios. We propose a unified UAV object detection method combining degradation‐aware frequency modeling and domain‐adaptive restoration, enabling consistent detection performance across complex weather conditions.