GLDS-YOLO: An Improved Lightweight Model for Small Object Detection in UAV Aerial Imagery

To enhance small object detection in UAV aerial imagery suffering from low resolution and complex backgrounds, this paper proposes GLDS-YOLO, an improved lightweight detection model. The model integrates four core modules: Group Shuffle Attention (GSA) to strengthen small-scale feature perception, Large Separable Kernel Attention (LSKA) to capture global semantic context, DCNv4 to enhance feature adaptability with reduced parameters, and further proposes a novel Small-object-enhanced Multi-scale and Structure Detail Enhancement (SMSDE) module, which enhances edge-detail representation of small objects while maintaining lightweight efficiency. Experiments on VisDrone2019 and DOTA1.0 demonstrate that GLDS-YOLO achieves superior detection performance. On VisDrone2019, it improves mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 by 12.1% and 7%, respectively, compared with YOLOv11n, while maintaining competitive results on DOTA. These results confirm the model’s effectiveness, robustness, and adaptability for complex small object detection tasks in UAV scenarios.