LRDS-YOLO enhances small object detection in UAV aerial images with a lightweight and efficient design

Small object detection in UAV aerial images is challenging due to low contrast, complex backgrounds, and limited computational resources. Traditional methods struggle with high miss detection rates and poor localization accuracy caused by information loss, weak cross-layer feature interaction, and rigid detection heads. To address these issues, we propose LRDS-YOLO, a lightweight and efficient model tailored for UAV applications. The model incorporates a Light Adaptive-weight Downsampling (LAD) module to retain fine-grained small object features and reduce information loss. A Re-Calibration Feature Pyramid Network (Re-Calibration FPN) enhances multi-scale feature fusion using bidirectional interactions and resolution-aware hybrid attention. The SegNext Attention mechanism improves target focus while suppressing background noise, and the dynamic detection head (DyHead) optimizes multi-dimensional feature weighting for robust detection. Experiments show that LRDS-YOLO achieves 43.6% mAP50 on VisDrone2019, 11.4% higher than the baseline, with only 4.17M parameters and 24.1 GFLOPs, striking a balance between accuracy and efficiency. On the HIT-UAV infrared dataset, it reaches 84.5% mAP50, demonstrating strong generalization. With its lightweight design and high precision, LRDS-YOLO offers an effective real-time solution for UAV-based small object detection.