DCP-YOLO: A Lightweight Anti-UAV Object Detection Network
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摘要: 随着低空经济的快速发展,无人机违规飞行带来严重安全隐患。针对现有反无人机检测方法存在小目标特征易丢失、边缘算力受限,难以平衡检测精度与模型轻量化的问题,该文提出一种基于YOLOv26n改进的轻量化多模块协同优化检测方法(DCP-YOLO)。首先设计DPC3k2轻量化特征提取结构,增强小目标多方向特征提取能力并缩减参数。然后,提出反向上采样模块CUS,恢复目标高频纹理细节。最后,构建C2PSCAA注意力增强模块,提升模型多尺度特征学习能力。在多个公开数据集的实验结果表明,该方法参数量仅2.29M,推理速度达210.71 FPS,检测精度较基线模型显著提升。消融与泛化实验验证了各模块的有效性与模型的泛化能力,可有效兼顾检测精度与轻量化性能,适配资源受限场景下的低空无人机实时检测任务。Abstract:
Objective With the rapid development of the low-altitude economy, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in aerial photography, logistics, environmental monitoring, and emergency rescue. However, unauthorized UAV operations pose increasing challenges to public safety and low-altitude airspace management. Vision-based anti-UAV detection has attracted considerable attention due to its relatively low cost, rich visual information, and convenient deployment. Compared with conventional objects, UAV targets in low-altitude surveillance images often exhibit small scales, weak textures, significant pose variations, and complex background interference. During repeated feature downsampling, the edge and structural information of these targets may be weakened or lost, resulting in missed detections, false alarms, and inaccurate localization. Furthermore, practical anti-UAV detection systems must balance detection accuracy, computational complexity, and real-time performance under limited hardware resources. Existing lightweight detection networks may struggle to preserve discriminative spatial details while maintaining computational efficiency, particularly when UAV targets occupy only a small proportion of the input image. To address these challenges, a lightweight anti-UAV object detection network named DCP-YOLO is proposed based on YOLOv26n. The objective is to enhance the feature representation and detection accuracy of tiny UAV targets while maintaining a compact model structure and real-time inference capability. Methods The proposed DCP-YOLO is developed based on the lightweight YOLOv26n framework to improve the detection performance of tiny UAV targets while maintaining real-time inference. The network consists of three collaboratively optimized components. In the backbone network, a lightweight feature extraction module named DPC3k2 is designed by integrating depthwise separable convolution (DSConv) and pinwheel-shaped convolution (PConv) to enhance multi-directional feature representation with reduced computational complexity, enabling more discriminative feature extraction for small UAV targets. DSConv reduces redundant spatial computation through the separation of spatial feature extraction and channel mapping, while PConv employs asymmetric convolutional branches to capture directional edge and contour information. During feature fusion, a learnable reverse upsampling module named CUS replaces the conventional interpolation-based upsampling operation to recover high-frequency edge and texture information, thereby improving feature reconstruction quality. In the neck network, a contextual attention enhancement module named C2PSCAA is constructed by incorporating Context Anchor Attention (CAA) into the C2PSA structure to strengthen long-range spatial dependency modeling and multi-scale contextual representation with only a slight computational overhead. Through the collaborative optimization of lightweight feature extraction, feature reconstruction, and contextual attention modeling, the proposed network effectively enhances the representation capability of tiny UAV targets while maintaining low computational complexity and high inference efficiency. Results and Discussions Extensive experiments are conducted on the DUT Anti-UAV, TIB-Net, and VisDrone2019 datasets. The ablation results in Tables 2 and4 demonstrate that the proposed DPC3k2, CUS, and C2PSCAA modules contribute to lightweight feature extraction, high-frequency detail reconstruction, and contextual feature modeling, respectively. On the DUT Anti-UAV dataset, their collaborative integration improves Precision, Recall, mAP@50, and mAP@50-95 to 98.7%, 90.0%, 92.4%, and 61.7%, respectively, while reducing the number of parameters to 2.29 M and maintaining an inference speed of 210.71 FPS. Similar performance improvements are observed on the TIB-Net dataset, confirming the effectiveness and complementarity of the three modules under different target scales and background conditions. The visualization results inFig. 6 further show that the proposed method reduces missed detections and false alarms for tiny UAV targets in cluttered scenes. The comparison results inTable 5 indicate that DCP-YOLO outperforms representative YOLO-series detectors in detection accuracy while maintaining lower model complexity and a smaller model size. Compared with the baseline YOLOv26n, mAP@50 and mAP@50-95 are improved from 90.0% and 59.4% to 92.4% and 61.7%, respectively, whereas the computational complexity is reduced from 5.2 GFLOPs to 5.0 GFLOPs. The convergence curves inFig. 8 show that DCP-YOLO maintains higher Precision and mAP@50-95 during training. Furthermore,Table 6 demonstrates that the proposed method achieves competitive or superior performance compared with recent anti-UAV and small-object detection methods while preserving a lightweight architecture. The detection results inFig. 7 visually confirm its stronger ability to identify tiny UAV targets under complex backgrounds. The cross-dataset results inTables 7 and8 show that DCP-YOLO also achieves improved detection performance on VisDrone2019 while reducing the number of parameters, computational complexity, and model size. Although VisDrone2019 differs substantially from anti-UAV datasets in target categories and imaging viewpoints, the proposed method still improves mAP@50-95 by 1.1% over YOLOv26n, demonstrating favorable cross-scene adaptability and generalization capability. To investigate practical deployment feasibility, the models are further evaluated on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano platform using TensorRT acceleration under a 25 W power setting, as illustrated inFig. 9 . As shown inTable 9 , DCP-YOLO achieves an mAP@50 of 94.59%, an mAP@50-95 of 62.70%, and an inference speed of 116.02 FPS in FP16 mode, with a memory consumption of 3.00 GB. Although its inference speed is lower than that of the baseline on the edge platform, DCP-YOLO maintains real-time inference capability while achieving higher detection accuracy. These findings indicate that reductions in theoretical computational complexity do not necessarily translate into proportional improvements in actual inference speed, particularly when frequency-domain operations are involved.Conclusions A lightweight anti-UAV object detection network named DCP-YOLO is proposed to address the challenges of weak feature representation, high-frequency detail degradation, and limited computational resources in low-altitude UAV detection. By jointly optimizing lightweight feature extraction, learnable upsampling, and contextual attention modeling, the proposed method enhances the detection accuracy of tiny UAV targets while maintaining a compact network structure. Experimental results on DUT Anti-UAV, TIB-Net, and VisDrone2019 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules and their applicability under different scene conditions. Compared with the baseline network, DCP-YOLO achieves higher detection accuracy with fewer parameters and lower theoretical computational complexity. Edge deployment experiments further demonstrate that the proposed method can maintain real-time inference capability on a resource-constrained platform, despite the additional computational overhead associated with its feature reconstruction operations. Nevertheless, the detection of extremely small targets under severe occlusion, adverse weather, and low-light conditions remains challenging. In addition, the current network primarily relies on single-frame visual information and does not explicitly exploit temporal relationships between consecutive frames. Future work will investigate the integration of target tracking, temporal feature modeling, and multimodal perception, together with further optimization of computationally intensive operations, to improve detection robustness and deployment efficiency in complex low-altitude environments. -
Key words:
- Small object detection /
- Anti-UAV detection /
- YOLOv26n /
- Lightweight object detection
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表 1 不同上采样的检测性能对比
上采样方式 P(%) R(%) mAP50(%) mAP50-95(%) Params/M GFLOPs Nearest(基线) 95.5 87.6 90.0 59.4 2.38 5.2 Transposed Conv 96.68 88.47 92.03 59.68 2.7 5.6 CUS 97.4 89.2 92.1 60.8 2.38 5.2 表 2 基于DUT Anti-UAV数据集消融实验结果
模型 P(%) R(%) mAP@50(%) mAP@50-95(%) GFLOPs Paras(M) Size(MB) FPS A 95.5 87.6 90.0 59.4 5.2 2.38 5.4 245.98 A+D 97.6 88.9 92.2 60.6 5.0 2.30 5.3 233.6 A+C 97.4 89.2 92.1 60.8 5.2 2.38 5.4 215.03 A+P 97.0 88.7 91.9 60.2 5.2 2.36 5.4 254.28 A+D+C 97.4 89.9 92.2 61.4 5.0 2.30 5.3 204.7 A+D+C+P 98.7 90.0 92.4 61.7 5.0 2.29 5.2 210.71 表 3 DPC3k2内部消融实验结果
模型 P(%) R(%) mAP@50(%) mAP@50-95(%) GFLOPs Paras(M) Size(MB) FPS Baseline 95.5 87.6 90.0 59.4 5.2 2.38 5.4 245.98 +DSConv 96.67 89.06 91.77 60.04 5.1 2.33 5.3 238.09 +PConv 96.88 89.04 91.81 60.1 4.9 2.18 5.1 248.29 +DPC3k2 97.6 88.9 92.2 60.6 5.0 2.30 5.3 233.6 表 4 基于TIB-Net 数据集消融实验结果
模型 P(%) R(%) mAP@50(%) mAP@50-95(%) GFLOPs Paras(M) Size(MB) FPS A 88.8 87.6 89.8 36.4 5.2 2.38 5.4 249.67 A+D 90 90 92.1 38.9 5.0 2.29 5.2 235.21 A+C 88.9 87.8 90.1 36.5 5.2 2.38 5.4 215.28 A+P 88.8 89.8 91.1 37.1 5.2 2.36 5.4 256.23 A+D+C 89.3 88.7 91 37.9 5.0 2.30 5.3 204.88 A+D+C+P 90.7 88.9 91 39 5.0 2.29 5.2 212.07 表 5 YOLO 系列模型对比实验结果
模型 P(%) R(%) mAP@50(%) mAP@50-95(%) GFLOPs Paras(M) Size(MB) FPS YOLOv3-tiny 92.3 73.2 75.9 44.3 18.9 12.13 23.3 1038.62 YOLOv5n 96 84.3 87.4 56.3 7.1 2.5 5.3 451.7 YOLOv8n 95.7 84.7 87.2 56.5 8.1 3.0 6.3 501.51 YOLOv10n 95 86 88.5 56.5 6.5 2.27 5.8 297.44 YOLOv11n 95.9 86.1 88.7 57.2 6.3 2.58 5.5 360.53 YOLOv12n 95.7 85.9 88.1 56.7 6.3 2.56 5.6 213.45 YOLOv26n 95.5 87.6 90.0 59.4 5.2 2.38 5.4 245.98 Ours 98.7 90.0 92.4 61.7 5.0 2.29 5.2 210.71 表 6 主流模型对比实验结果
模型 P(%) R(%) mAP@50(%) mAP@50-95(%) GFLOPs Paras(M) AAP2-YOLO[11] 96.1 85.4 90.9 - 9.4 1.66 YOLO-ADD[12] 86.4 93 91.5 60.6 15.1 4.22 DCR-YOLO[13] 95 81.3 88.8 58.6 6.1 2.43 DRBD-YOLOv8[14] 90.9 77 85.7 53.5 5.7 1.57 YOLO11n-SMSH[15] 94.8 85.7 91.5 61.3 9.4 2.6 ET-YOLOv6[18] - - 90.6 58.8 7.9 3.2 DRF-YOLO[20] 93.9 80.3 86.9 54.8 - - TARG-YOLO[25] - - 89.98 61.14 75.64 19.7 Ours 98.7 90.0 92.4 61.7 5.0 2.29 表 7 VisDrone2019跨数据集泛化检测性能比较
模型 P(%) R(%) mAP@50(%) mAP@50-95(%) YOLOv26n 42.3 30.9 28.6 15.6 Ours 42.7 32.3 28.8 16.7 表 8 模型复杂度与推理速度比较
模型 GFLOPs Paras(M) Size(MB) FPS YOLOv26n 5.2 2.38 5.4 249.33 Ours 5.0 2.29 5.2 211.53 表 9 在Jetson Orin Nano平台上的边缘部署性能
模型 精度模式 mAP@50(%) mAP@50-95(%) FPS 内存/GB YOLOv26n FP32 90.98 60.14 95.05 3.07 DCP-YOLO FP32 94.71 62.64 85.38 2.93 YOLOv26n FP16 90.89 60.26 181.27 3.27 DCP-YOLO FP16 94.59 62.7 116.02 3.00 -
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