With the advancement of satellite remote sensing technology, object detection based on high-resolution remote sensing imagery has emerged as a prominent research focus in the field of computer vision. Although numerous algorithms have been developed for remote sensing image object detection, they still suffer from challenges such as low detection accuracy and high false positive rates. To address these issues, we propose a novel architecture, the multiscale feature fusion network (MSFFNet). MSFFNet is composed of three key components: the Large Selective Kernel Block (LSKBlock), the Space-to-Depth ADown (SPDA) module and the Double Feature Aggregation Neck (DFAN). Specifically, the LSKBlock adaptively captures salient target features by dynamically adjusting the receptive field size, thereby enhancing detection precision. The SPDA module converts spatial correlations into channel-wise dependencies by segmenting and reordering the feature maps, which helps preserve fine-grained information, suppress background interference and reduce false detections. Furthermore, the DFAN integrates shallow and deep features through a multiscale feature fusion module (MSFFM), enabling the extraction of multiscale target representations and improving overall detection performance. Extensive experiments on public datasets, SIMD, VisDrone2019 and DIOR, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with the YOLOv9s baseline model, MSFFNet achieves improvements in mAP50% of 0.6%, 1.9% and 3.5%, respectively.
Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 62076107 and U24A20330) and Jiangsu Province Industry University Research Cooperation Project (No. BY20231471).
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Data Availability Statement
The data and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.
| [1] |
Q. Peng, Y. Cai, J. Liu, P. Fan, and M. Sun, “Multilayer Feature Extraction Network for Military Ship Detection From High-Resolution Optical Remote Sensing Images,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 14 (2021): 11058-11069, https://doi.org/10.1109/jstars.2021.3123080.
|
| [2] |
R. Reedha, E. Dericquebourg, R. Canals, and A. Hafiane, “Transformer Neural Network for Weed and Crop Classification of High Resolution UAV Images,” Remote Sensing 14, no. 3 (2022): 592, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14030592.
|
| [3] |
V. Gagliardi, F. Tosti, L. Bianchini Ciampoli, et al., Satellite Remote Sensing and Non-Destructive Testing Methods for Transport Infrastructure Monitoring: Advances, Challenges and Perspectives,” Remote Sensing 15, no. 2 (2023): 418, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15020418.
|
| [4] |
C. Nithesh, T. Shakthi, G. Sumathi, et al., RSA Based Forest Fire Spread Detection Using Drones and Image Processing,” in 2022 IEEE 3rd Global Conference for Advancement in Technology (GCAT) (IEEE, 2022), 1-4.
|
| [5] |
B. Mishra, D. Garg, P. Narang, and V. Mishra, “Drone-Surveillance for Search and Rescue in Natural Disaster,” Computer Communications 156 (2020): 1-10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2020.03.012.
|
| [6] |
T. Ma, Z. Yang, B. Liu, and S. Sun, “A Lightweight Infrared Small Target Detection Network Based on Target Multiscale Context,” IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters 20 (2022): 1-5, https://doi.org/10.1109/lgrs.2022.3229083.
|
| [7] |
X. Ma and Li Yang, “Edge-Aided Multiscale Context Network for Infrared Small Target Detection,” IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters 20 (2023): 1-5, https://doi.org/10.1109/lgrs.2023.3318052.
|
| [8] |
H. Yue, H. Zhang, J. Wan, et al., Small Target Detection Algorithm for UAV Aerial Photography Based on Attention Mechanism,” in 2024 5th International Seminar on Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Information Technology (AINIT) (IEEE, 2024), 672-676.
|
| [9] |
Z. Huo, T. Yan, and W. Cao, “Fast Small Object Detection Algorithm Based on Feature Enhancement and Reconstruction,” in 2021 13th International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (WCSP) (IEEE, 2021), 1-5.
|
| [10] |
Z. Sun, J. Liu, P. Li, et al., DGAP-YOLO: A Crack Detection Method Based on UAV Images and YOLO,” in International Conference on Intelligent Computing (Springer, 2024), 482-492.
|
| [11] |
Y. Chen, W. Zheng, Y. Zhao, T. H. Song, and H. Shin, “Dw-yolo: An Efficient Object Detector for Drones and Self-Driving Vehicles,” Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering 48, no. 2 (2023): 1427-1436, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-022-06874-7.
|
| [12] |
C. Zhong, “CACS-YOLO: A Lightweight Model for Insulator Defect Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8m,” in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, (2024).
|
| [13] |
F. Gao, Q. Zhu, G. Shao, Y. Su, J. Yang, and X. Yu, “A Fast Surface-Defect Detection Method Based on Dense-YOLO Network,” CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology 10, no. 2 (2025): 415-433, https://doi.org/10.1049/cit2.12407.
|
| [14] |
X. Yuan, X. Xu, X. Wang, et al., OSAP-Loss: Efficient Optimization of Average Precision via Involving Samples After Positive Ones Towards Remote Sensing Image Retrieval,” CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology 8, no. 4 (2023): 1191-1212, https://doi.org/10.1049/cit2.12151.
|
| [15] |
L. Ma, S. Cong, H. Shanshan, W. Zoujian, W. Xuhao, and W. Yanxi, “Sddnet: Infrared Small and Dim Target Detection Network,” CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology 8, no. 4 (2023): 1226-1236, https://doi.org/10.1049/cit2.12165.
|
| [16] |
Y. Yang, Z. Miao, H. Zhang, B. Wang, and L. Wu, “Lightweight Attention-Guided YOLO With Level Set Layer for Landslide Detection From Optical Satellite Images,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 17 (2024): 3543-3559, https://doi.org/10.1109/jstars.2024.3351277.
|
| [17] |
X. Bai, “A Front-Back View Fusion Strategy and A Novel Dataset for Super Tiny Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery,” in Knowledge-Based Systems, (2025). 114051.
|
| [18] |
Y. Liu, Q. Ye, L. Sun, “SOD-YOLOv8n: Small Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on YOLOv8n,” in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, (2025).
|
| [19] |
J. Hu, Y. Li, X. Zhi, “Complementarity-Aware Feature Fusion for Aircraft Detection via Unpaired Opt2SAR Image Translation,” in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, (2025).
|
| [20] |
J. Hu, Y. Wei, W. Chen, X. Zhi, and W. Zhang, “CM-YOLO: Typical Object Detection Method in Remote Sensing Cloud and Mist Scene Images,” Remote Sensing 17, no. 1 (2025): 125, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17010125.
|
| [21] |
Y. Li, “Large Selective Kernel Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, (2023), 16794-16805.
|
| [22] |
C. Cai, L. Chen, X. Zhang, and Z. Gao, “End-To-End Optimized ROI Image Compression,” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 29 (2019): 3442-3457, https://doi.org/10.1109/tip.2019.2960869.
|
| [23] |
S. Ren, K. He, R. Girshick, and J. Sun, “Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection With Region Proposal Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 39, no. 6 (2016): 1137-1149, https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2016.2577031.
|
| [24] |
Ge Zheng, S. Liu, F. Wang, Z. Li, J. Sun, “Yolox: Exceeding Yolo Series in 2021,” preprint arXiv: 2107 (2021): 08430.
|
| [25] |
J. Redmon, “You Only Look Once: Unified, real-time Object Detection,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2016), 779-788.
|
| [26] |
J. Redmon and F. Ali, “YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2017), 7263-7271.
|
| [27] |
J. Redmon and F. Ali, “Yolov3: An Incremental Improvement,” preprint arXiv: 1804 (2018): 02767.
|
| [28] |
W. Liu, D. Anguelov, D. Erhan, et al., Ssd: Single Shot Multibox Detector,” in Computer Vision-ECCV 2016: 14Th European Conference, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, October 11-14, 2016, Proceedings, Part I 14 (Springer, 2016), 21-37.
|
| [29] |
K. Doi and A. Iwasaki, “The Effect of Focal Loss in Semantic Segmentation of High Resolution Aerial Image,” in IGARSS 2018-2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IEEE, 2018), 6919-6922.
|
| [30] |
J. Hu, Li Shen, and G. Sun, “Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2018), 7132-7141.
|
| [31] |
Li Xiang, X. Hu, and J. Yang, “Spatial Group-Wise Enhance: Improving Semantic Feature Learning in Convolutional Networks,” preprint arXiv: 1905 (2019): 09646.
|
| [32] |
S. Woo, J. Park, J. Y. Lee, “Cbam: Convolutional Block Attention Module,” in Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), (2018), 3-19.
|
| [33] |
S. Liu, “Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2018), 8759-8768.
|
| [34] |
G. Ghiasi, T.-Yi Lin, and V. Le Quoc, “Nas-Fpn: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2019), 7036-7045.
|
| [35] |
S. Liu, Di Huang, and Y. Wang, “Learning Spatial Fusion for Single-Shot Object Detection,” preprint arXiv:1911.09516 (2019).
|
| [36] |
M. Tan, R. Pang, and Q. V. Le, “Efficientdet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2020), 10781-10790.
|
| [37] |
C.-Y. Wang, I.-H. Yeh, and H.-Y. M. Liao, “Yolov9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information,” in European Conference on Computer Vision (Springer, 2024), 1-21.
|
| [38] |
S. Raja and T. Luo, “No More Strided Convolutions or Pooling: A New CNN Building Block for Low-Resolution Images and Small Objects,” in Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (Springer, 2022), 443-459.
|
| [39] |
X. Ding, X. Zhang, N. Ma, et al., Repvgg: Making VGG-Style Convnets Great Again,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2021), 13733-13742.
|
| [40] |
M. Haroon, M. Shahzad, and M. M. Fraz, “Multisized Object Detection Using Spaceborne Optical Imagery,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 13 (2020): 3032-3046, https://doi.org/10.1109/jstars.2020.3000317.
|
| [41] |
P. Zhu, L. Wen, D. Du, et al., Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 44, no. 11 (2021): 7380-7399, https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2021.3119563.
|
| [42] |
Ke Li, G. Wan, G. Cheng, L. Meng, and J. Han, “Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and a New Benchmark,” ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 159 (2020): 296-307, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2019.11.023.
|
| [43] |
K. Duan, S. Bai, L. Xie, et al., Centernet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, (2019), 6569-6578.
|
| [44] |
H. Wang, B. Liu, Z. Liu, et al., LSS Target Threat Estimation and Capture Prediction Trajectory Simulation,” in 2020 7th International Conference on Information Science and Control Engineering (ICISCE) (IEEE, 2020), 806-813.
|
| [45] |
Y. Zhao, W. Lv, S. Xu, et al., Detrs Beat Yolos on Real-Time Object Detection,” in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (2024), 16965-16974.
|
| [46] |
Ultralytics. ultralytics/yolov5: v7.0-YOLOv5 SOTA Realtime Instance Segmentation, https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5.
|
| [47] |
C.-Y. Wang, A. Bochkovskiy, and H.-Y. M. Liao, “YOLOv7-Tiny: Trainable Bag-of-Freebies Sets New State-of-the-Art for Real-Time Object Detectors,” arXiv:2207.02696 [cs.CV] (2022), https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02696.
|
| [48] |
Ultralytics. Ultralytics YOLOv8: Real-Time Object Detection, Segmentation, and Pose Estimation, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7347926.
|
| [49] |
Ao Wang, K. Chen, G. Ding, et al., Yolov10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (2024): 107984-108011, https://doi.org/10.52202/079017-3429.
|
| [50] |
R. Khanam and M. Hussain, “YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements,” preprint arXiv:2410 (2024): 17725.
|
| [51] |
Y. Tian, Q. Ye, and D. Doermann, “Yolov12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors,” preprint arXiv:2502 (2025): 12524.
|