# UHR-DETR: Efficient End-to-End Small Object Detection for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21435/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [DETRs with Collaborative Hybrid Assignments Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12860/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12219/) (2021)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [Clustered Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08008/) (2019)
- [Density Map Guided Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05520/) (2020)
- [PANDA: A Gigapixel-level Human-centric Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04852/) (2020)
- [GeoLLaVA-8K: Scaling Remote-Sensing Multimodal Large Language Models to 8K Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21375/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Sparse Convolutional Networks with Global Context Enhancement for Faster Object Detection on Drone Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14488/) (2023)
- [FOVEA: Foveated Image Magnification for Autonomous Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12102/) (2021)
- [STAR: A First-Ever Dataset and A Large-Scale Benchmark for Scene Graph Generation in Large-Size Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09410/) (2024)
- [DQ-DETR: DETR with Dynamic Query for Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03507/) (2024)
- [SALISA: Saliency-based Input Sampling for Efficient Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02397/) (2022)
- [Learning to Zoom and Unzoom](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15390/) (2023)
- [SparseFormer: Detecting Objects in HRW Shots via Sparse Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07216/) (2025)
- [Dome-DETR: DETR with Density-Oriented Feature-Query Manipulation for Efficient Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05741/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) imagery has become essential for modern remote sensing, offering unprecedented spatial coverage. However, detecting small objects in such vast scenes presents a critical dilemma: retaining the original resolution for small objects causes prohibitive memory bottlenecks. Conversely, conventional compromises like image downsampling or patch cropping either erase small objects or destroy context. To break this dilemma, we propose UHR-DETR, an efficient end-to-end transformer-based detector designed for UHR imagery. First, we introduce a Coverage-Maximizing Sparse Encoder that dynamically allocates finite computational resources to informative high-resolution regions, ensuring maximum object coverage with minimal spatial redundancy. Second, we design a Global-Local Decoupled Decoder. By integrating macroscopic scene awareness with microscopic object details, this module resolves semantic ambiguities and prevents scene fragmentation. Extensive experiments on the UHR imagery datasets (e.g., STAR and SODA-A) demonstrate the superiority of UHR-DETR under strict hardware constraints (e.g., a single 24GB RTX 3090). It achieves a 2.8% mAP improvement while delivering a 10× inference speedup compared to standard sliding-window baselines on the STAR dataset. Our codes and models will be available at https://github.com/Li-JingFang/UHR-DETR.