EFSI-DETR: Efficient Frequency-Semantic Integration for Real-Time Small Object Detection in UAV Imagery

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Hauptverfasser: Xia, Yu, Liu, Chang, Xiang, Tianqi, Tu, Zhigang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Xia, Yu
Liu, Chang
Xiang, Tianqi
Tu, Zhigang
author_facet Xia, Yu
Liu, Chang
Xiang, Tianqi
Tu, Zhigang
contents Real-time small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery remains challenging due to limited feature representation and ineffective multi-scale fusion. Existing methods underutilize frequency information and rely on static convolutional operations, which constrain the capacity to obtain rich feature representations and hinder the effective exploitation of deep semantic features. To address these issues, we propose EFSI-DETR, a novel detection framework that integrates efficient semantic feature enhancement with dynamic frequency-spatial guidance. EFSI-DETR comprises two main components: (1) a Dynamic Frequency-Spatial Unified Synergy Network (DyFusNet) that jointly exploits frequency and spatial cues for robust multi-scale feature fusion, (2) an Efficient Semantic Feature Concentrator (ESFC) that enables deep semantic extraction with minimal computational cost. Furthermore, a Fine-grained Feature Retention (FFR) strategy is adopted to incorporate spatially rich shallow features during fusion to preserve fine-grained details, crucial for small object detection in UAV imagery. Extensive experiments on VisDrone and CODrone benchmarks demonstrate that our EFSI-DETR achieves the state-of-the-art performance with real-time efficiency, yielding improvement of \textbf{1.6}\% and \textbf{5.8}\% in AP and AP$_{s}$ on VisDrone, while obtaining \textbf{188} FPS inference speed on a single RTX 4090 GPU.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_18597
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EFSI-DETR: Efficient Frequency-Semantic Integration for Real-Time Small Object Detection in UAV Imagery
Xia, Yu
Liu, Chang
Xiang, Tianqi
Tu, Zhigang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Real-time small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery remains challenging due to limited feature representation and ineffective multi-scale fusion. Existing methods underutilize frequency information and rely on static convolutional operations, which constrain the capacity to obtain rich feature representations and hinder the effective exploitation of deep semantic features. To address these issues, we propose EFSI-DETR, a novel detection framework that integrates efficient semantic feature enhancement with dynamic frequency-spatial guidance. EFSI-DETR comprises two main components: (1) a Dynamic Frequency-Spatial Unified Synergy Network (DyFusNet) that jointly exploits frequency and spatial cues for robust multi-scale feature fusion, (2) an Efficient Semantic Feature Concentrator (ESFC) that enables deep semantic extraction with minimal computational cost. Furthermore, a Fine-grained Feature Retention (FFR) strategy is adopted to incorporate spatially rich shallow features during fusion to preserve fine-grained details, crucial for small object detection in UAV imagery. Extensive experiments on VisDrone and CODrone benchmarks demonstrate that our EFSI-DETR achieves the state-of-the-art performance with real-time efficiency, yielding improvement of \textbf{1.6}\% and \textbf{5.8}\% in AP and AP$_{s}$ on VisDrone, while obtaining \textbf{188} FPS inference speed on a single RTX 4090 GPU.
title EFSI-DETR: Efficient Frequency-Semantic Integration for Real-Time Small Object Detection in UAV Imagery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18597