YOLO-DRS: A Bioinspired Object Detection Algorithm for Remote Sensing Images Incorporating a Multi-Scale Efficient Lightweight Attention Mechanism

Bioinspired object detection in remotely sensed images plays an important role in a variety of fields. Due to the small size of the target, complex background information, and multi-scale remote sensing images, the generalized YOLOv5 detection framework is unable to obtain good detection results. In order to deal with this issue, we proposed YOLO-DRS, a bioinspired object detection algorithm for remote sensing images incorporating a multi-scale efficient lightweight attention mechanism. First, we proposed LEC, a lightweight multi-scale module for efficient attention mechanisms. The fusion of multi-scale feature information allows the LEC module to completely improve the model’s ability to extract multi-scale targets and recognize more targets. Then, we propose a transposed convolutional upsampling alternative to the original nearest-neighbor interpolation algorithm. Transposed convolutional upsampling has the potential to greatly reduce the loss of feature information by learning the feature information dynamically, thereby reducing problems such as missed detections and false detections of small targets by the model. Our proposed YOLO-DRS algorithm exhibits significant improvements over the original YOLOv5s. Specifically, it achieves a 2.3% increase in precision (P), a 3.2% increase in recall (R), and a 2.5% increase in mAP@0.5. Notably, the introduction of the LEC module and transposed convolutional results in a respective improvement of 2.2% and 2.1% in mAP@0.5. In addition, YOLO-DRS only increased the GFLOPs by 0.2. In comparison to the state-of-the-art algorithms, namely YOLOv8s and YOLOv7-tiny, YOLO-DRS demonstrates significant improvements in the mAP@0.5 metrics, with enhancements ranging from 1.8% to 7.3%. It is fully proved that our YOLO-DRS can reduce the missed and false detection problems of remote sensing target detection.