GSR-Net: enhancing real-time UAV remote sensing object detection via a lightweight transformer model
摘要
Remote sensing image detection using deep learning has emerged as a pivotal research area. Recent studies have focused on enhancing feature extraction and multi-scale fusion, often at the cost of increased inference latency. In UAV remote sensing, achieving a balance between detection accuracy and inference speed is crucial. This paper introduces GSR-Net, a lightweight Transformer-based model tailored for real-time UAV remote sensing object detection. GSR-Net integrates HGNetv2 with Ghost convolution and ARConv, specifically designed for small object detection, to create an efficient and lightweight architecture. This design significantly reduces model parameters and computational complexity without sacrificing detection accuracy. Furthermore, GSR-Net adopts a streamlined feature fusion strategy (SFF) that fuses only low-noise upper-level features, optimizing performance. An improved particle swarm optimization algorithm is introduced for hyperparameter tuning during training, shifting computational burden from inference to training. Experiments on the VisDrone2019 dataset demonstrate GSR-Net’s superiority, achieving 93.9 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX4090D GPU, outpacing RT-DETR by 35.8 FPS, with improved AP and AP50 by 1.6 and 2.2%, respectively, using 19.6M fewer parameters and only 50.7 GFLOPs. Real-world UAV experiments further validate GSR-Net’s robustness against frame loss and missed detections, offering a practical solution for drone inspection applications. The code is open source at https://github.com/mpwmpw/GSR-Net.