# HGSQ: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for Real-Time Aerial Small Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13306 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13306/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [SparseFormer: Detecting Objects in HRW Shots via Sparse Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07216/) (2025)
- [DeepInterestGR: Mining Deep Multi-Interest Using Multi-Modal LLMs for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18907/) (2026)
- [IGASA: Integrated Geometry-Aware and Skip-Attention Modules for Enhanced Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12719/) (2026)
- [HMPE:HeatMap Embedding for Efficient Transformer-Based Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13469/) (2025)
- [Exploring Fourier Prior and Event Collaboration for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00308/) (2025)
- [NeuroSymActive: Differentiable Neural-Symbolic Reasoning with Active Exploration for Knowledge Graph Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15353/) (2026)
- [Learning Where to Embed: Noise-Aware Positional Embedding for Query Retrieval in Small-Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15065/) (2026)
- [TriAlignGR: Triangular Multitask Alignment with Multimodal Deep Interest Mining for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05249/) (2026)
- [When Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20810/) (2026)
- [CaST-POI: Candidate-Conditioned Spatiotemporal Modeling for Next POI Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20845/) (2026)
- [Agent4POI: Agentic Context-Conditioned Affordance Reasoning for Multimodal Point-of-Interest Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15203/) (2026)
- [MotionCraft: Latent World Modeling with Sparse Attention for Visual Upscaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08553/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time aerial small object detection is an important visual signal and image processing problem, requiring a detector to preserve fine-grained localization while avoiding redundant computation on large background regions. This paper focuses on this deployment-oriented aerial/UAV setting rather than claiming a universal detector for all object detection scenarios. Existing Transformer-based detectors provide strong global modeling, but their dense query initialization and multi-layer decoder still spend substantial computation on background tokens, which is inefficient when small objects occupy only sparse image regions. To address this problem, this paper proposes HGSQ, a Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for real-time aerial small object detection. HGSQ uses a lightweight Heatmap Budget Predictor (HBP) to predict a foreground budget map in a single forward pass. The predicted heatmap is then used by three fixed components: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Selection (HSQS), which initializes decoder queries from high-confidence foreground positions; Heatmap-Gated Lite Snake Convolution (HGLSConv), which performs local shape refinement only on heatmap-activated small-object regions; and Adaptive Query-Decoder Budgeting (AQDB), which adjusts the query budget and decoder depth according to the estimated object density. Unlike post-hoc heatmap generation, HGSQ treats the heatmap as a real-time computation budget rather than a visualization map during deployment. Experiments on NWPU VHR-10 and VisDrone2019 show that HGSQ achieves 95.10 mAP50 on NWPU VHR-10 and 54.8 mAP50 on VisDrone2019, while reducing GFLOPs to 48.6 and running at 96.0 FPS on an RTX 4070 under our TensorRT FP16 deployment protocol.