Lingma Sun

Zhicheng Zhao, Yin Huang, Lingma Sun et al.

Tiny object detection in remote sensing imagery has attracted significant research interest in recent years. Despite recent progress, achieving balanced detection performance across diverse object scales remains a formidable challenge, particularly in scenarios where dense tiny objects and large objects coexist. Although large foundation models have revolutionized general vision tasks, their application to tiny object detection remains unexplored due to the extreme scale variation and density distribution inherent to remote sensing imagery. To bridge this scale gap, we propose ScaleBridge-Det, to the best of our knowledge, the first large detection framework designed for tiny objects, which could achieve balanced performance across diverse scales through scale-adaptive expert routing and density-guided query allocation. Specifically, we introduce a Routing-Enhanced Mixture Attention (REM) module that dynamically selects and fuses scale-specific expert features via adaptive routing to address the tendency of standard MoE models to favor dominant scales. REM generates complementary and discriminative multi-scale representations suitable for both tiny and large objects. Furthermore, we present a Density-Guided Dynamic Query (DGQ) module that predicts object density to adaptively adjust query positions and numbers, enabling efficient resource allocation for objects of varying scales. The proposed framework allows ScaleBridge-Det to simultaneously optimize performance for both dense tiny and general objects without trade-offs. Extensive experiments on benchmark and cross-domain datasets demonstrate that ScaleBridge-Det achieves state-of-the-art performance on AI-TOD-V2 and DTOD, while exhibiting superior cross-domain robustness on VisDrone.

Zhicheng Zhao, Xuanang Fan, Lingma Sun et al.

High-resolution remote sensing imagery increasingly contains dense clusters of tiny objects, the detection of which is extremely challenging due to severe mutual occlusion and limited pixel footprints. Existing detection methods typically allocate computational resources uniformly, failing to adaptively focus on these density-concentrated regions, which hinders feature learning effectiveness. To address these limitations, we propose the Dense Region Mining Network (DRMNet), which leverages density maps as explicit spatial priors to guide adaptive feature learning. First, we design a Density Generation Branch (DGB) to model object distribution patterns, providing quantifiable priors that guide the network toward dense regions. Second, to address the computational bottleneck of global attention, our Dense Area Focusing Module (DAFM) uses these density maps to identify and focus on dense areas, enabling efficient local-global feature interaction. Finally, to mitigate feature degradation during hierarchical extraction, we introduce a Dual Filter Fusion Module (DFFM). It disentangles multi-scale features into high- and low-frequency components using a discrete cosine transform and then performs density-guided cross-attention to enhance complementarity while suppressing background interference. Extensive experiments on the AI-TOD and DTOD datasets demonstrate that DRMNet surpasses state-of-the-art methods, particularly in complex scenarios with high object density and severe occlusion.