# SFFNet: Synergistic Feature Fusion Network With Dual-Domain Edge Enhancement for UAV Image Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03176 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03176/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [Large Selective Kernel Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09030/) (2023)
- [Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08008/) (2019)
- [Dense Distinct Query for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12776/) (2023)
- [QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09136/) (2021)
- [Density Map Guided Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05520/) (2020)
- [Detecting tiny objects in aerial images: A normalized Wasserstein distance and a new benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13996/) (2022)
- [AugFPN: Improving Multi-scale Feature Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05384/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Sparse Convolutional Networks with Global Context Enhancement for Faster Object Detection on Drone Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14488/) (2023)
- [Efficient Multi-Scale Attention Module with Cross-Spatial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13563/) (2023)
- [DAMO-YOLO : A Report on Real-Time Object Detection Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15444/) (2022)
- [UFPMP-Det: Toward Accurate and Efficient Object Detection on Drone Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10415/) (2021)
- [PeLK: Parameter-efficient Large Kernel ConvNets with Peripheral Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07589/) (2024)
- [Extended Feature Pyramid Network for Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07021/) (2020)
- [Cascaded Zoom-in Detector for High Resolution Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08747/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images remains a highly challenging task, primarily caused by the complexity of background noise and the imbalance of target scales. Traditional methods easily struggle to effectively separate objects from intricate backgrounds and fail to fully leverage the rich multi-scale information contained within images. To address these issues, we have developed a synergistic feature fusion network (SFFNet) with dual-domain edge enhancement specifically tailored for object detection in UAV images. Firstly, the multi-scale dynamic dual-domain coupling (MDDC) module is designed. This component introduces a dual-driven edge extraction architecture that operates in both the frequency and spatial domains, enabling effective decoupling of multi-scale object edges from background noise. Secondly, to further enhance the representation capability of the model's neck in terms of both geometric and semantic information, a synergistic feature pyramid network (SFPN) is proposed. SFPN leverages linear deformable convolutions to adaptively capture irregular object shapes and establishes long-range contextual associations around targets through the designed wide-area perception module (WPM). Moreover, to adapt to the various applications or resource-constrained scenarios, six detectors of different scales (N/S/M/B/L/X) are designed. Experiments on two challenging aerial datasets (VisDrone and UAVDT) demonstrate the outstanding performance of SFFNet-X, achieving 36.8 AP and 20.6 AP, respectively. The lightweight models (N/S) also maintain a balance between detection accuracy and parameter efficiency. The code will be available at https://github.com/CQNU-ZhangLab/SFFNet.