MMAF-YOLO: A UAV object detection network based on multi-scale mutual aggregation and fine-grained feature modulation

Abstract Automated analysis of UAV imagery is crucial for remote sensing but faces challenges like extreme scale variations, complex background clutter, and the vanishing of fine-grained details. To address these limitations, we propose MMAF-YOLO, a novel object detection network based on multi-scale mutual aggregation and fine-grained feature modulation. First, we design a Multi-Scale Mutual Aggregation Fusion (MMAF) block in the backbone to replace the standard C3k2 module. This effectively ca