Aero-YOLO26: A Lightweight Detector for Small-Object Detection in UAV-Acquired Images with Collaborative Feature Optimization.

Low-altitude remote sensing utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has evolved into a core pillar of the space-air-ground integrated perception architecture. However, research on detection tasks in UAV aerial imagery grapples with three principal hurdles: feature annihilation of small targets, insufficient robustness under intricate environmental variations, and constrained computational capacity of onboard edge devices. To tackle these issues, a lightweight aerial small-target detection model denoted as Aero-YOLO26 was proposed for aerial image object detection. It introduced a C2f_GhostECA lightweight feature extraction module and a SlimSPPF streamlined multi-scale pooling module, and optimized the global receptive field of the Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) mechanism. Furthermore, it reconstructed the backbone and Path Aggregation Network (PAN)-Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) fusion network, enabling lightweight co-optimization of extraction, pooling, and fusion. Experiments on the VisDrone2019 dataset show that Aero-YOLO26n reduces the parameter count by 22.6% compared with YOLO26n, while improving precision, recall, mAP@50, mAP@50-95, and F1 score by 14.9%, 15.2%, 11.4%, 11.7%, and 14.8%, respectively. On the self-built UAV-MCT dataset, it attains 85.61% precision, 83.78% recall, mAP@50 of 90.82%, and mAP@50-95 of 59.60%, with average precision (AP) for cars and pedestrians reaching 99.4% and 96.6%. The proposed lightweight computer-vision object detection model using UAV-acquired imagery markedly bolsters the detection performance for small objects in UAV-acquired aerial imagery while achieving extreme model size compression, and its excellent performance demonstrates its potential for a wide range of application scenarios.