Enhanced UAV-Dot for UAV Crowd Localization: Adaptive Gaussian Heat Map and Attention Mechanism to Address Scale/Low-Light Challenges

In public safety scenarios, such as large-scale event security and urban crowd management, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) serve as a vital tool for crowd localization, offering high mobility and broad coverage. However, UAV-based overhead localization faces challenges, including significant target scale variations due to altitude changes and poor feature visibility in low-light conditions. To overcome these issues, this study enhances the UAV-Dot framework by introducing a scale prediction branch for adaptive Gaussian heatmap adjustment, embedding a CBAM attention module in the U-Net encoder to strengthen feature extraction in dim environments and optimizing post-processing via dynamic thresholding and DBSCAN clustering. Experiments on the DroneCrowd dataset show that the improved model increases parameters by only 0.36% during training and 0.29% during testing yet achieves 53.38% L-mAP—outperforming the original UAV-Dot by 2.38% and STNNet by 12.93%. The model also delivers consistent gains of approximately 2% in L-AP@10, L-AP@15, and L-AP@20.