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Firstly, inspired by the Cross Stage Partial Networks (CSPNet), a Dynamic Multi-Scale Edge Enhancement Network (DMS-EdgeNet) is designed to improve robustness to local target features. This module applies multi-scale pooling to extract edge features at various scales and dynamically fuses them through adaptive weighting. Secondly, the DynaScale Aggregation Network (DySAN) module is introduced into the neck network, and a multi-level jump connections structure is adopted to fuse low-level and high-level boundary semantics, thereby improving the detection capability of fuzzy boundary targets and improving target positioning accuracy under complex imaging conditions. Finally, a P2 small target layer is added to further improve the accuracy of small target detection. Based on these innovations, we propose a new architecture named Dynamic Multi-scale and Channel-scaled YOLO (DMS-YOLO), significantly improve the model\u2019s ability to perceive small targets. Experimental results show that DMS-YOLO improves mAP50 and mAP50-95 by 7.0% and 2.9%, respectively, on the Aerial Traffic Images dataset, and by 5.1% and 3.1% on the VisDrone-DET2019 dataset, demonstrating superior performance over the YOLOv11n baseline.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0341991","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,30]],"date-time":"2026-01-30T18:47:15Z","timestamp":1769798835000},"page":"e0341991","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1371\/journal.pone.corrections_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["DMS-YOLO: Small target detection algorithm based on YOLOv11"],"prefix":"10.1371","volume":"21","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0004-2467-033X","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Minyu","family":"Huang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Wengang","family":"Jiang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"340","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,30]]},"reference":[{"key":"pone.0341991.ref001","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Chinnari P, Sinha S, Ishaa B, Bharill N, Patel OP. 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