Robust Small-Object Detection in Aerial Surveillance via Integrated Multi-Scale Probabilistic Framework

Youyou Li, Yuxiang Fang, Shixiong Zhou, Yicheng Zhang () and Nuno Antunes Ribeiro ()
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Youyou Li: School of Air Traffic Management, Civil Aviation Flight University of China, Deyang 618307, China
Yuxiang Fang: School of Air Traffic Management, Civil Aviation Flight University of China, Deyang 618307, China
Shixiong Zhou: School of Air Traffic Management, Civil Aviation Flight University of China, Deyang 618307, China
Yicheng Zhang: Institute for Infocomm Research at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore 138632, Singapore
Nuno Antunes Ribeiro: Aviation Studies Institude, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore 487372, Singapore

Mathematics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-23

Abstract: Accurate and efficient object detection is essential for aerial airport surveillance, playing a critical role in aviation safety and the advancement of autonomous operations. Although recent deep learning approaches have achieved notable progress, significant challenges persist, including severe object occlusion, extreme scale variation, dense panoramic clutter, and the detection of very small targets. In this study, we introduce a novel and unified detection framework designed to address these issues comprehensively. Our method integrates a Normalized Gaussian Wasserstein Distance loss for precise probabilistic bounding box regression, Dilation-wise Residual modules for improved multi-scale feature extraction, a Hierarchical Screening Feature Pyramid Network for effective hierarchical feature fusion, and DualConv modules for lightweight yet robust feature representation. Extensive experiments conducted on two public airport surveillance datasets, ASS1 and ASS2, demonstrate that our approach yields substantial improvements in detection accuracy. Specifically, the proposed method achieves an improvement of up to 14.6 percentage points in mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) compared to state-of-the-art YOLO variants, with particularly notable gains in challenging small-object categories such as personnel detection. These results highlight the effectiveness and practical value of the proposed framework in advancing aviation safety and operational autonomy in airport environments.

Keywords: aerial surveillance; small-object detection; multi-scale features; bounding box regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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