Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) plays a crucial role in resource utilization, geological disaster risk assessment and urban planning. Deep learning-based object-detection algorithms have proven effective in remote sensing image studies. However, accurate detection of objects with small size, dense distribution and complex object arrangement remains a significant challenge in the remote sensing field. To address this, a refined and efficient object-detection algorithm (RE-YOLO) has been proposed in this paper for remote sensing images. Initially, a refined and efficient module (REM) was designed to balance computational complexity and feature-extraction capabilities, which serves as a key component of the RE_CSP block. RE_CSP block efficiently extracts multi-scale information, overcoming challenges posed by complex backgrounds. Moreover, the spatial extracted attention module (SEAM) has been proposed in the bottleneck of backbone to promote representative feature learning and enhance the semantic information capture. In addition, a three-branch path aggregation network (TBPAN) has been constructed as the neck network, which facilitates comprehensive fusion of shallow positional information and deep semantic information across different channels, enabling the network with a robust ability to capture contextual information. Extensive experiments conducted on two large-scale remote sensing datasets, DOTA-v1.0 and SCERL, demonstrate that the proposed RE-YOLO outperforms state-of-the-art other object-detection approaches and exhibits a significant improvement in generalization ability.