CDF-DETR: Cross-Stage Attention and Dual-Scale Feature Calibration for Small-Object Detection in UAV Remote Sensing Imagery

Small-object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing imagery is challenged by dense target distributions, substantial scale variation, complex ground backgrounds, and limited edge-computing resources. To address these challenges, we propose CDF-DETR, an end-to-end detector derived from the Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT-DETR). First, a Cross-Stage Partial Single-Head Attention Transformer (CSP-SHAT) backbone combines efficient local feature extraction with partial-channel global interaction to improve multi-scale representation while reducing the parameter count of the backbone. Second, a dual-scale feature calibration (DSFC) module sequentially performs contextual aggregation and deformable spatial alignment, thereby improving the consistency of shallow localization features and deep semantic features. Third, Focaler-MPDIoU integrates coordinate-sensitive regression with IoU-quality-based sample reweighting for dense small-object localization. Experiments on the VisDrone-2019 test set and the UAVDT and HIT-UAV validation sets demonstrate mAP50 improvements of 3.1, 1.4, and 3.0 percentage points, respectively, over the RT-DETR-R18 baseline. On the VisDrone-2019 validation set, CDF-DETR improves mAP50–95 from 26.20% to 28.52%, corresponding to a gain of 2.32 percentage points, while reducing the parameter count by 25.7%. A compressed INT8 variant achieves 20.84 FPS for an offline image-level pipeline on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano using ONNX and TensorRT. These results demonstrate improved detection accuracy with a reduced parameter footprint for UAV remote sensing image analysis.