Lightweight Multispectral Detection and DEM-Constrained Ray Consistency Localization for UAV-Assisted Search and...

Reliable target detection and geographic localization are critical for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted search and rescue (SAR) yet remain challenging in complex outdoor environments. Small targets in UAV Red-Green-Blue-Infrared (RGB-IR) imagery suffer from background clutter, occlusion, low illumination, and infrared thermal diffusion, while localization is vulnerable to unstable viewpoints and terrain-induced ray uncertainty. This study presents an integrated UAV-SAR framework coupling lightweight multispectral detection with Digital Elevation Model (DEM)-constrained geographic localization. For detection, the Asymmetric Fusion and Context-aware Detection (AFC-Det) network leverages asymmetric dual-stream encoding, cross-modal mutual prompting, and high-resolution anchored aggregation to enhance small-target representation from RGB-IR pairs. For localization, the Global Context-Regularized Huber Ray Consistency Optimization (GCR-HRCO) improves geolocation via global ray aggregation, multi-ray geometric consistency, Huber robust optimization, and DEM-based terrain constraints. Experimental results demonstrate AFC-Det achieves 45.4% average precision (AP) and 44.7% AP for small objects (APs) on the VTSaR dataset, with 1.7 million parameters, 8.0 GFLOPs, and 107.2 FPS, generalizing well to M3FD (54.6% AP). On SAR-DAG_raycast, GCR-HRCO reduces mean horizontal error from 6.85 m to 3.31 m and RMSE from 8.16 m to 4.33 m. Collectively, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed detection and localization components.