A robust small-object detection model for UAV aerial imagery under complex background clutter

To tackle the challenge of detecting small targets in UAV imagery, this paper proposes PF-DETR, an enhanced object detection model based on RT-DETR, designed to improve detection accuracy in complex scenes. The improvements are primarily reflected in the following aspects. First, a P2 detection head is added to extend the feature pyramid to finer scales, thereby enhancing the ability of shallow features to detect small targets. Second, a Pyramidal Hierarchical Frequency-Domain Fusion (PHF) module is introduced. By combining wavelet pooling with high- and low-frequency attention, the module effectively extracts and fuses multi-scale features, reduces information loss, and improves detection accuracy for small targets. Finally, the backbone network is restructured through the design of a lightweight BasicBlock_FasterNet_Rep module, which integrates FasterNet and RepVGG-style re-parameterization. This restructuring significantly reduces model complexity and parameters while strengthening multi-scale feature extraction. Experimental results on the VisDrone2019 dataset show that the improved PF-DETR achieves a notable performance boost: compared to the original model, mAP@0.5 increases by 5.4%, while the number of parameters is reduced by 25.0%. The computational cost increases by about 35.0%, but this comes with higher accuracy, resulting in a favorable balance between detection performance and model efficiency. Overall, these improvements enhance the model’s robustness and accuracy in detecting multi-scale and small targets in complex and cluttered scenes.