WS-DETR: A Wavelet-mamba and shared query attention enhanced DETR for traffic object detection
摘要
AAccurate and efficient detection of small or dim traffic objects remains a major challenge in intelligent transportation systems. To address these issues, this paper proposes WS-DETR, a real-time DETR-based detection framework designed to enhance small-object perception and reduce false detections under low-light conditions. The model integrates two key components. First, the WM-Dual Block utilizes wavelet decomposition as a structural prior for the Mamba state-space model, guiding the scanning mechanism to explicitly capture complementary high-frequency details and low-frequency semantics. Second, the SQ-ACA mechanism employs shared-query axial cross-attention to ensure feature consistency across spatial directions. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets–M3FD, BDD100K, and UA-DETRAC–demonstrate that WS-DETR achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art YOLO and DETR variants, particularly in small-object and low-light scenarios. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/ZehuaChenLab/WSDETR.