SE-CBAM-YOLOv7: An Improved Lightweight Attention Mechanism-Based YOLOv7 for Real-Time Detection of Small Aircraft Targets in Microsatellite Remote Sensing Imaging

Addressing real-time aircraft target detection in microsatellite-based visible light remote sensing video imaging requires considering the limitations of imaging payload resolution, complex ground backgrounds, and the relative positional changes between the platform and aircraft. These factors lead to multi-scale variations in aircraft targets, making high-precision real-time detection of small targets in complex backgrounds a significant challenge for detection algorithms. Hence, this paper introduces a real-time aircraft target detection algorithm for remote sensing imaging using an improved lightweight attention mechanism that relies on the You Only Look Once version 7 (YOLOv7) framework (SE-CBAM-YOLOv7). The proposed algorithm replaces the standard convolution (Conv) with a lightweight convolutional squeeze-and-excitation convolution (SEConv) to reduce the computational parameters and accelerate the detection process of small aircraft targets, thus enhancing real-time onboard processing capabilities. In addition, the SEConv-based spatial pyramid pooling and connected spatial pyramid convolution (SPPCSPC) module extracts image features. It improves detection accuracy while the feature fusion section integrates the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) hybrid attention network, forming the convolutional block attention module Concat (CBAMCAT) module. Furthermore, it optimizes small aircraft target features in channel and spatial dimensions, improving the model’s feature fusion capabilities. Experiments on public remote sensing datasets reveal that the proposed SE-CBAM-YOLOv7 improves detection accuracy by 0.5% and the mAP value by 1.7% compared to YOLOv7, significantly enhancing the detection capability for small-sized aircraft targets in satellite remote sensing imaging.