# CollabOD: Collaborative Multi-Backbone with Cross-scale Vision for UAV Small Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05905/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [PANet: Few-Shot Image Semantic Segmentation with Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06391/) (2019)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [NAS-FPN: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07392/) (2019)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [Drone-based Object Counting by Spatially Regularized Regional Proposal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05972/) (2017)
- [Focal and Global Knowledge Distillation for Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11837/) (2021)
- [Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08008/) (2019)
- [PP-YOLOE: An evolved version of YOLO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16250/) (2022)
- [QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09136/) (2021)
- [Learning Spatial Fusion for Single-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09516/) (2019)
- [Focal and Efficient IOU Loss for Accurate Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08158/) (2021)
- [AugFPN: Improving Multi-scale Feature Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05384/) (2019)
- [SuperYOLO: Super Resolution Assisted Object Detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13351/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Sparse Convolutional Networks with Global Context Enhancement for Faster Object Detection on Drone Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14488/) (2023)
- [YOLO-MS: Rethinking Multi-Scale Representation Learning for Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05480/) (2023)
- [AFPN: Asymptotic Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15988/) (2023)
- [Small Object Detection: A Comprehensive Survey on Challenges, Techniques and Real-World Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20516/) (2025)
- [ESOD: Efficient Small Object Detection on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16424/) (2024)
- [UAV-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Object Detection for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01855/) (2025)
- [Cross-Layer Feature Pyramid Transformer for Small Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19696/) (2024)
- [LEGNet: A Lightweight Edge-Gaussian Network for Low-Quality Remote Sensing Image Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14012/) (2025)
- [MHAF-YOLO: Multi-Branch Heterogeneous Auxiliary Fusion YOLO for accurate object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04656/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is challenging because high-altitude viewpoints produce severe scale variation, weak structural cues, and tight computational budgets. Existing lightweight detectors usually fuse multi-scale features after downsampling, where boundary and texture details have already been attenuated and heterogeneous feature streams may be spatially misaligned. To address these issues, we propose CollabOD, a collaborative detection framework that preserves structural details, aligns cross-path features before fusion, and keeps the detection head lightweight at inference time. CollabOD combines a Dual-Path Fusion Stem, a Dense Aggregation Block, a Bilateral Reweighting Module, and a Unified Detail-Aware Head to strengthen localization-oriented representation while limiting extra computation. On VisDrone, CollabOD obtains 52.4 AP50, 30.8 AP75, and 29.9 AP50:95 with 65.5 GFLOPs; on UAVDT it reaches 31.2 AP50 and 17.4 AP50:95; and on AI-TOD it reaches 45.4 AP50 and 20.0 AP50:95 at 137 FPS. The code is available at: https://github.com/Bai-Xuecheng/CollabOD.