Enhanced infrared small object detection in UAV imagery: DiSTA-DETR with dilated-sparse thermal attention
摘要
Addressing the challenges of small object detection in UAV-captured infrared images, this study introduces DiSTA-DETR, an enhanced detection model based on RT-DETR-R18. The model incorporates an enhanced dilated transformer attention (EDTA) module for expanded receptive fields and robust small object representation, an enhanced guided context aggregation (EGCA) module for multi-scale feature extraction, and a hybrid sparse enhancement (HSE) module for global modeling and fine-detail preservation. Experiments on the HIT-UAV dataset demonstrate significant improvements, with a 5.9% increase in mAP50 and a 3.7% increase in mAP50:95, confirming the model's effectiveness in complex scenarios. The code and associated datasets are available at https://github.com/88kucheng/DiSTA-DETR.