A Lightweight Multi-Scale Context Detail Network for Efficient Military Target Detection in Resource-Constrained Environments

Military target detection faces multiple challenges, such as the use of camouflage, diverse target sizes, and harsh environmental conditions. Moreover, the need for solutions suitable for edge computing environments, which have limited computational resources, adds complexity to the task. To meet these challenges, we propose MSCDNet (Multi-Scale Context Detail Network), an innovative and lightweight architecture designed specifically for efficient target detection in such environments. MSCDNet integrates three key components: the Multi-Scale Fusion Module, which improves the representation of features at various target scales; the Context Merge Module, which enables adaptive feature integration across scales to handle a wide range of target conditions; and the Detail Enhance Module, which emphasizes preserving crucial edge and texture details for detecting camouflaged targets. Extensive evaluations highlight the effectiveness of MSCDNet, which achieves 40.1% mAP50-95, 86.1% precision, and 68.1% recall, while maintaining a low computational load with only 2.22M parameters and 6.0G FLOPs. When compared to other models, MSCDNet outperforms YOLO-family variants by 1.9% in mAP50-95 and uses 14% fewer parameters. Additional generalization tests on VisDrone2019 and BDD100K further validate its robustness, with improvements of 1.1% in mAP50 on VisDrone and 1.2% in mAP50-95 on BDD100K over baseline models. These results affirm that MSCDNet is well-suited for tactical deployment in scenarios with limited computational resources, where reliable target detection is paramount.