SOD-YOLO: Enhancing YOLO-Based Detection of Small Objects in UAV Imagery

Small object detection remains a challenging problem in the field of object detection. To address this challenge, we propose an enhanced YOLOv8-based model, SOD-YOLO. This model integrates an ASF mechanism in the neck to enhance multi-scale feature fusion, adds a Small Object Detection Layer (named P2) to provide higher-resolution feature maps for better small object detection, and employs Soft-NMS to refine confidence scores and retain true positives. Experimental results demonstrate that SOD-YOLO significantly improves detection performance, achieving a 36.1% increase in mAP50:95 and 20.6% increase in mAP₅₀ on the VisDrone2019-DET dataset compared to the baseline model. These enhancements make SOD-YOLO a practical and efficient solution for small object detection in UAV imagery. Our source code, hyper-parameters, and model weights are available at https://github.com/iamwangxiaobai/SOD-YOLO.