DNW-YOLO: a cost-effective hardware–software system for small UAVs in complex backgrounds
摘要
In recent years, the rapid expansion of the UAV industry has driven the demand for efficient detection systems. However, existing solutions typically suffer from prohibitive hardware costs and struggle to accurately perceive small targets embedded in complex backgrounds with limited visual features. To address these challenges, we present DayNight Wander YOLO, a hardware-software integrated system designed for cost-effective and precise small-target perception. On the hardware side, we design a low-cost, autonomous monitoring node based on the K230 platform, enabling wire-free deployment in off-grid environments. On the algorithmic side, we construct a multi-weather dataset and propose a tailored lightweight detection model designed to handle complex environmental interference. The network incorporates a Wave-LLG structure that decomposes feature frequencies to preserve fine-grained edge details. Furthermore, a HyperSPP module utilizes hypergraph correlations to capture global context, while a cross-dimensional attention mechanism suppresses background noise. Performance evaluation on our self-built VSUAV dataset demonstrates that DNW-YOLO achieves competitive accuracy. When deployed on the K230 board, the system delivers 77.0 mAP