With the falling cost of UAVs and advances in automation, drones are increasingly applied in agriculture, inspection, and smart cities. However, small object detection remains difficult due to tiny targets, sparse features, and complex backgrounds. To tackle these challenges, this paper presents an improved small object detection framework for UAV imagery, optimized from the YOLOv11n architecture. First, the proposed MetaDWBlock integrates multi-branch depthwise separable convolutions with a lightweight MLP, and its hierarchical MetaDWStage enhances contextual and fine-grained feature modeling. Second, the Cross-scale Feature Fusion Module (CFFM) employs the CARAFE upsampling operator for precise fusion of shallow spatial and deep semantic features, improving multi-scale perception. Finally, a scale-, spatial-, and task-aware Dynamic Head with an added P2 branch forms a four-branch detection head, markedly boosting detection accuracy for tiny objects. Experimental results on the VisDrone2019 dataset demonstrate that the proposed DRM-YOLO model significantly outperforms the baseline YOLOv11n in small object detection tasks, achieving a 21.4% improvement in [email protected] and a 13.1% improvement in [email protected]. These results fully validate the effectiveness and practical value of the proposed method in enhancing the accuracy and robustness of small object detection in UAV aerial imagery. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/DRdairuiDR/DRM--YOLO.
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