A Text-Guided Vision Model for Enhanced Recognition of Small Instances

As drone-based object detection technology continues to evolve, the demand is shifting from merely detecting objects to enabling users to accurately identify specific targets. For example, users can input particular targets as prompts to precisely detect desired objects. To address this need, an efficient text-guided object detection model has been developed to enhance the detection of small objects. Specifically, an improved version of the existing YOLO-World model is introduced. The proposed method replaces the C2f layer in the YOLOv8 backbone with a C3k2 layer, enabling more precise representation of local features, particularly for small objects or those with clearly defined boundaries. Additionally, the proposed architecture improves processing speed and efficiency through parallel processing optimization, while also contributing to a more lightweight model design. Comparative experiments on the VisDrone dataset show that the proposed model outperforms the original YOLO-World model, with precision increasing from 40.6% to 41.6%, recall from 30.8% to 31%, F1 score from 35% to 35.5%, and mAP@0.5 from 30.4% to 30.7%, confirming its enhanced accuracy. Furthermore, the model demonstrates superior lightweight performance, with the parameter count reduced from 4 million to 3.8 million and FLOPs decreasing from 15.7 billion to 15.2 billion. These results indicate that the proposed approach provides a practical and effective solution for precise object detection in drone-based applications.

YOLO-Drone: An Efficient Object Detection Approach Using the GhostHead Network for Drone Images

Object detection using images or videos captured by drones is a promising technology with significant potential across various industries. However, a major challenge is that drone images are typically taken from high altitudes, making object identification difficult. This paper proposes an effective solution to address this issue. The base model used in the experiments is YOLOv11, the latest object detection model, with a specific implementation based on YOLOv11n. The experimental data were sourced from the widely used and reliable VisDrone dataset, a standard benchmark in drone-based object detection. This paper introduces an enhancement to the Head network of the YOLOv11 algorithm, called the GhostHead Network. The model incorporating this improvement is named YOLO-Drone. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-Drone achieves significant improvements in key detection accuracy metrics, including Precision, Recall, F1-Score, and mAP (0.5), compared to the original YOLOv11. Specifically, the proposed model recorded a 0.4% increase in Precision, a 0.6% increase in Recall, a 0.5% increase in F1-Score, and a 0.5% increase in mAP (0.5). Additionally, the Inference Speed metric, which measures image processing speed, also showed a notable improvement. These results indicate that YOLO-Drone is a high-performance model with enhanced accuracy and speed compared to YOLOv11. To further validate its reliability, comparative experiments were conducted against other high-performance object detection models, including YOLOv8, YOLOv9, and YOLOv10. The results confirmed that the proposed model outperformed YOLOv8 by 0.1% in mAP (0.5) and surpassed YOLOv9 and YOLOv10 by 0.3% and 0.6%, respectively.