UHR-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Small Object Detection for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Jingfang, Zhu, Haoran, Yang, Wen, Zhang, Jinrui, Xu, Fang, Zhang, Haijian, Xia, Gui-Song
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Jingfang
Zhu, Haoran
Yang, Wen
Zhang, Jinrui
Xu, Fang
Zhang, Haijian
Xia, Gui-Song
author_facet Li, Jingfang
Zhu, Haoran
Yang, Wen
Zhang, Jinrui
Xu, Fang
Zhang, Haijian
Xia, Gui-Song
contents Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) imagery has become essential for modern remote sensing, offering unprecedented spatial coverage. However, detecting small objects in such vast scenes presents a critical dilemma: retaining the original resolution for small objects causes prohibitive memory bottlenecks. Conversely, conventional compromises like image downsampling or patch cropping either erase small objects or destroy context. To break this dilemma, we propose UHR-DETR, an efficient end-to-end transformer-based detector designed for UHR imagery. First, we introduce a Coverage-Maximizing Sparse Encoder that dynamically allocates finite computational resources to informative high-resolution regions, ensuring maximum object coverage with minimal spatial redundancy. Second, we design a Global-Local Decoupled Decoder. By integrating macroscopic scene awareness with microscopic object details, this module resolves semantic ambiguities and prevents scene fragmentation. Extensive experiments on the UHR imagery datasets (e.g., STAR and SODA-A) demonstrate the superiority of UHR-DETR under strict hardware constraints (e.g., a single 24GB RTX 3090). It achieves a 2.8\% mAP improvement while delivering a 10$\times$ inference speedup compared to standard sliding-window baselines on the STAR dataset. Our codes and models will be available at https://github.com/Li-JingFang/UHR-DETR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21435
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UHR-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Small Object Detection for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery
Li, Jingfang
Zhu, Haoran
Yang, Wen
Zhang, Jinrui
Xu, Fang
Zhang, Haijian
Xia, Gui-Song
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) imagery has become essential for modern remote sensing, offering unprecedented spatial coverage. However, detecting small objects in such vast scenes presents a critical dilemma: retaining the original resolution for small objects causes prohibitive memory bottlenecks. Conversely, conventional compromises like image downsampling or patch cropping either erase small objects or destroy context. To break this dilemma, we propose UHR-DETR, an efficient end-to-end transformer-based detector designed for UHR imagery. First, we introduce a Coverage-Maximizing Sparse Encoder that dynamically allocates finite computational resources to informative high-resolution regions, ensuring maximum object coverage with minimal spatial redundancy. Second, we design a Global-Local Decoupled Decoder. By integrating macroscopic scene awareness with microscopic object details, this module resolves semantic ambiguities and prevents scene fragmentation. Extensive experiments on the UHR imagery datasets (e.g., STAR and SODA-A) demonstrate the superiority of UHR-DETR under strict hardware constraints (e.g., a single 24GB RTX 3090). It achieves a 2.8\% mAP improvement while delivering a 10$\times$ inference speedup compared to standard sliding-window baselines on the STAR dataset. Our codes and models will be available at https://github.com/Li-JingFang/UHR-DETR.
title UHR-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Small Object Detection for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21435