LDS-YOLO: A lightweight small object detection method for dead trees from shelter forest

Xuewen Wang, Qingzhan Zhao, Ping Jiang, Yuchen Zheng, Limengzi Yuan, Panli Yuan

Abstract: Highlights•A lightweight architecture for dead tree detection is designed called LDS-YOLO.•A novel feature extraction network for small target detection is proposed.•The detection accuracy is improved by dense connectivity and SPP with SoftPool.•The state-of-the-art models for dead tree detection are compared.