Occlusion-aware vehicle detection in UAV imagery is challenging due to partial visibility from varied viewpoints, dense scenes, and limited features. To address this, we introduce two contributions. First, VOD-UAV, the first UAV-based vehicle detection dataset focused on occlusion, containing 712 synthetic and 1219 real-world images, each annotated with five discrete occlusion levels. These fine-grained labels enable structured supervision and detailed analysis under varying visibility conditions. Second, DOMino-YOLO, a YOLOv11-based detection framework, enhances occlusion robustness via three components: the Deformable Convolution Enhanced Module (DCEM) for spatial alignment, the Visibility-Aware Structural Aggregation (VASA) module for multi-scale feature extraction from partially visible regions, and the Context-Suppressed Implicit Modulation Head (CSIM-Head) for reducing false activations by adaptive channel reweighting. An Occlusion-Aware Repulsion Loss (OAR-Loss) combines Repulsion Loss and Visibility-Weighted Classification Loss to suppress redundant predictions and emphasize heavily occluded objects. Extensive experiments on VOD-UAV demonstrate that DOMino-YOLO significantly improves detection accuracy and robustness under occlusion. The dataset and code will publicly available to support future research.

In this paper, we propose an anti-occlusion target association algorithm in an overlapping cross-UAV system. This method focuses on associating targets with the same ID detected by different UAVs. Unlike other approaches that rely solely on images captured by optical cameras, our approach fully leverages data from multiple sensors to extract more reliable and stable association features. Therefore, it still maintains robustness in the face of common challenges, such as unreliable image features and occluded targets. First, we introduced a novel similarity measurement model based on spatial consistency (SC), developed through an analysis of altitude and positional relationships among targets detected by multiple UAVs. This approach leverages data fusion from multiple sensors, including cameras, IMU, and GPS. Simultaneously, we use a tracker to directly transmit association relationships from previous frames based on temporal consistency (TC), and design a decision module to adaptively select more robust SC-based strategy or more efficient TC-based strategy. This significantly improves the efficiency of the algorithm without compromising accuracy. After that, the homography constraint is utilized to optimize the preliminary results and restore the occluded targets. To achieve this, we propose a cost evaluation method to enhance the effectiveness of optimization and restoration by filtering out unreliable homography matrices. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method.

Recent advancements in deep-learning and computer vision technologies, coupled with the availability of large-scale remote-sensing image datasets, have accelerated the progress of remote-sensing object detection. However, large-scale remote-sensing images typically feature extensive and complex backgrounds with small and sparsely distributed objects, which pose significant challenges to detection performance. To address this, we propose a novel framework for accurate object detection, termed transparent mask background optimization for accurate object detection (TMBO-AOD), which incorporates a clear focus module and an adaptive filtering framework. The clear focus module constructs an empirical background pool using a Gaussian distribution and introduces transparent masks to prepare for subsequent optimization stages. The adaptive filtering framework can be applied to anchor-based or anchor-free models. It dynamically adjusts the number of candidates generated based on background flags, thereby optimizing the label assignment process. This approach not only alleviates the imbalance between positive and negative samples but also enhances the efficiency of candidate generation. Furthermore, we introduce a novel separated loss function that strengthens both foreground and background consistencies. Specifically, it focuses the model’s attention on foreground objects while enabling it to learn the consistency of background features, thus improving its ability to distinguish objects from the background. We employ YOLOv8 combined with our proposed optimizations to evaluate our model in many datasets, demonstrating improvements in both accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, we validate the effectiveness of our adaptive filtering framework in both anchor-based and anchor-free methods. When implemented with YOLOv5 (anchor based), the framework reduces the candidate generation time by 48.36%, while the YOLOv8 (anchor-free) implementation achieves a 46.81% reduction, both with maintained detection accuracy.