GFLNet: A lightweight real-time detector with knowledge-guided compression in remote sensing images

Jing Zhang, Mas Rina Mustaffa, Fatimah Khalid, Zainal Abdul Kahar and Tao Zhang

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 10, 1-23

Abstract: Remote sensing images usually exhibits densely distributed targets and scale disparities. In such scenarios, it is still challenging to preserve high detection precision while controlling costs and inference latency. To address this issue, we propose GFLNet, a lightweight single-stage detector, which is based on collaborative feature modeling and knowledge-guided compression. Specifically, Ghost-Shuffle dual fusion convolution (GSD-Fuse) is designed to achieve efficient spatial-channel interaction while reducing computational cost; an adaptive receptive-field selection module inspired by LSKNet is introduced into the deeper backbone and neck stages to adaptively adjust contextual responses for small-object and multi-scale detection; finally, LB-Compress combines layer-adaptive magnitude pruning with Bidirectional Cross-task Knowledge Distillation (BCKD) to form a compact network suitable for practical deployment. Evaluated on the DIOR and UCAS-AOD datasets, GFLNet improves mAP@0.5 over the baseline by 3.9% and 3.4%, respectively. Moreover, the model contains only 2.35M parameters, with a calculation of 5.6 GFLOPs, and an inference speed of 261 FPS on the GPU, thereby delivering a favorable accuracy-efficiency synergy.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0361806

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0361806

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