ECP-YOLO: Integrating Edge-Aware Attention and Contextual Refinement for UAV Object Detection

Object detection in UAV imagery is hindered by micro-scale targets, dense distributions, and cluttered backgrounds, where existing detectors fail to simultaneously achieve high accuracy and real-time throughput. We propose ECP-YOLO, a lightweight framework built on YOLOv12s, incorporating four modules: Pinwheel Convolution (PConv) for direction-selective geometric modeling, a Context Refiner Block (CRB) for spatially gated background suppression, an Edge-Aware Attention Fusion Module (EAFM) for structural boundary preservation, and a Progressive Inter-Scale Feature Fusion (PISF) strategy for cascaded cross-scale detail propagation, alongside a high-resolution P2 detection head. On VisDrone2019, ECP-YOLO achieves 38.1% mAP@0.5 and 22.1% mAP@0.5:0.95, surpassing YOLOv12s by 6.3% and 3.5% at 79 FPS. On UAVDT, Precision improves from 27.0% to 34.1% and mAP@0.5 from 28.7% to 30.4%, demonstrating cross-dataset transferability. These results demonstrate that ECP-YOLO achieves competitive accuracy–efficiency trade-offs for real-time UAV detection in complex environments.