WaveUAV-YOLO: A Lightweight Architecture for UAV Object Detection with Frequency-Domain Edge Preservation and Stable Gradient Fusion

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) object detection is a core technology for cross-modal, wide-area surveillance. However, operating at high altitudes under complex flight conditions imposes extreme physical constraints, generating massive sub-pixel targets, elongated morphologies, and dense object clustering. These challenges are critically important because conventional lightweight detectors deployed on edge devices often suffer from severe high-frequency edge loss during spatial downsampling, morphological distortion of anisotropic targets, and the mathematical suppression of weak feature gradients during cross-scale fusion, ultimately leading to severe missed detections. To overcome these inherent bottlenecks, this paper proposes WaveUAV-YOLO, a lightweight architecture prioritizing frequency-domain edge preservation and stable gradient propagation. First, a Wavelet High-Frequency Downsampling (WHFD) module augments standard convolutions by utilizing Haar wavelet decomposition to explicitly capture and compensate for the lost boundary cues of sub-pixel targets. Second, an Asymmetric Multi-scale Bottleneck without Dimensionality Compression (C2f_AMSB) cancels forced channel compression and introduces asymmetric convolutions to effectively adapt to elongated targets. Third, a Mean-Normalized Feature Aggregation (FFM_Concat) prevents deep background features from suppressing weak shallow signals during fusion. Extensive experiments on VisDrone2019, DIOR, NWPU, and HIT-UAV demonstrate that WaveUAV-YOLO (11.70 M parameters) achieves competitive or superior detection precision against recent lightweight UAV detectors. Furthermore, it achieves an end-to-end inference speed of ≈50 FPS on a standard desktop GPU, validating a favorable balance between sub-pixel detection reliability and computational efficiency for adverse UAV environments.