Dynamic feature and context enhancement network for faster detection of small objects

While traditional object detection methods have achieved significant success in recent years, their performance in detecting small objects in aerial remote sensing images remains unsatisfactory. Small objects often occupy only a few pixels, leading to a loss of fine-grained information. This paper proposes a dynamic feature and context enhancement network (DFCE) to address noise and pixel-level region weighting issues in small object detection. The DFCE network effectively detects small objects by dynamically selecting features within regions and establishing connections between local and global contextual information. The introduced dynamic multi-dimensional attention (DMA) module selects key information via a crossover mechanism and assigns different weights to highlight important features. Based on DMA, the regional feature processing (RFP) module and multi-dimensional pool transformer (MPT) module are developed to capture key information and contextual information, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the DFCE network improves average precision (AP) by 3.1%, 9%, and 2.2% on two remote sensing datasets and one conventional dataset, achieving an inference speed of 30 frames per second (FPS). Given these advancements, the DFCE model’s powerful key feature extraction and contextual association capabilities show strong potential for broader applications, including sign language recognition, defect detection in industrial settings, and more.