Small Object Detection in Drone Aerial Imagery with LAF-YOLOv10

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14560v1
• Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:46:43 GMT
• Title: Small Object Detection in Drone Aerial Imagery with LAF-YOLOv10
• Abstract summary: General-purpose object detectors lose accuracy on UAV footage, where targets span only a handful of pixels and onboard compute is limited.<n>Prior work composes independently-validated architectural techniques into one detector, assuming gains reported in isolation transfer once combined.<n>We stress-test that assumption directly. LAF-YOLOv10 integrates four techniques into YOLOv10n.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: General-purpose object detectors lose accuracy on UAV footage, where targets span only a handful of pixels and onboard compute is limited. Prior work composes independently-validated architectural techniques into one detector, assuming gains reported in isolation transfer once combined. We stress-test that assumption directly. LAF-YOLOv10 integrates four techniques into YOLOv10n: a Partial Convolution C2f (PC-C2f) backbone block, an Attention-Guided Feature Pyramid Network (AG-FPN), a P2 detection head replacing the large-object P5 head, and Wise-IoU v3 regression, asking whether their combined effect matches what each contributes alone. We train LAF-YOLOv10 three times (seeds 42, 123, 256) on VisDrone-DET2019, benchmark against unmodified YOLOv10n, and use TIDE error decomposition, per-category breakdown, per-component ablation, attention/loss comparisons, zero-shot transfer to UAVDT, and held-out/test-dev evaluation to localize where the combination succeeds or fails. Composability does not hold here. LAF-YOLOv10 reaches 24.0+/-0.4% mAP@0.5 at 2.14M parameters, 7.8 points below YOLOv10n (31.8%), a deficit that transfers to UAVDT (-10.0 points) and is confirmed by held-out and test-dev evaluation (23.5%, 22.5%). Background false positives, localization error, and duplicate detections move in the direction AG-FPN and Wise-IoU were designed to push. Ablation traces the deficit to a specific source: the P2/-P5 head swap costs 2.5 points independently plus a 2.5-point interaction penalty when layered onto a backbone weakened by PC-C2f, whose own 2.0-point loss is consistent with a partial pretrained-weight transplant (73/150 backbone tensors transfer). The failure is attributable to a specific interaction, not the four components individually. Composability must be verified directly, not assumed. Code/checkpoints: https://github.com/Mudassiruddin7/Small-Object-Detection-in-UAV-Imagery.

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