LSCNet: A Lightweight Shallow Feature Cascade Network for Small Object Detection in UAV Imagery

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have become essential mobile sensing nodes in Internet of Things ecosystems, with applications ranging from disaster monitoring to traffic surveillance. However, wireless bandwidth is severely strained when sending enormous amounts of high-resolution aerial video to ground stations. To address these communication limitations, the current research paradigm is shifting toward UAV-assisted edge computing, where visual data is processed locally to extract semantic information for transmitting results to the ground or making autonomous decisions. Although deep detection is the dominant trend in general object detection, the heavy computational burden of these deep detection methods struggles to meet the stringent efficiency requirements of airborne edge platforms. Consequently, although recently proposed single-stage models like YOLOv10 can quickly detect objects in natural images, their over-dependence on deep features for computation results in wasted computational resources, as shallow information is crucial for small object detection in aerial scenes. In this paper, we propose LSCNet (Lightweight Shallow Feature Cascade Network), a novel lightweight architecture designed for UAV edge computing to handle aerial object detection tasks. Our lightweight Cascade Network focuses on feature extraction and shallow feature enhancement. LSCNet achieves 44.6% m A P 50 on VisDrone2019 and 36.1% m A P 50 on UAVDT, while decreasing parameters by 33% to 1.48 M. These results not only show how effective LSCNet is for real-time object detection but also provide a foundation for future developments in semantic communication within aerial networks.