{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,2]],"date-time":"2026-10-02T17:15:36Z","timestamp":1790961336096,"version":"4.1.0"},"reference-count":21,"publisher":"Public Library of Science (PLoS)","issue":"6","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,10]],"date-time":"2026-06-10T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1781049600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Graduate Innovation Fund of Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics","award":["2025CX117"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2025CX117"]}]},{"name":"Cost Estimation System for Aerospace Forgings Based on VC6.0","award":["22029014"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["22029014"]}]},{"name":"Composite Material Production Cost Accounting System for Aerospace Components","award":["22029040"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["22029040"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["www.plosone.org"],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["PLoS One"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery remains challenging due to low resolution, complex backgrounds, and limited pixel occupancy. Conventional CNN-based detectors rely on fixed receptive fields, which often fail to capture fine-grained spatial details and implicit geometric relationships. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Coordinate-Aware Implicit Neural Representation Enhanced C2INR module that integrates coordinate-based representations into convolutional feature extraction. The Multi-Scale Coordinate Encoder (MSCE) constructs frequency-aware positional embeddings through sinusoidal encoding to enhance spatial continuity at multiple scales. The INR Feature Enhancer (IFE) further fuses encoded coordinates with visual features via lightweight MLP modulation, improving sensitivity to small-scale variations. Additionally, a Small Object Attention mechanism combines global context, local detail, and high-frequency cues to strengthen responses to tiny targets. Experiments on three UAV benchmarks\u2014AI-TOD, UAVDT, and VisDrone\u2014demonstrate consistent improvements over existing methods with minimal computational overhead. Further evaluation on PASCAL VOC verifies strong cross-domain generalization. These findings confirm that coordinate-aware implicit representation provides an effective and broadly applicable solution for improving spatial continuity, geometric fidelity, and localization precision in small-object detection.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1371\/journal.pone.0350990","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,10]],"date-time":"2026-06-10T17:38:36Z","timestamp":1781113116000},"page":"e0350990","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1371\/journal.pone.corrections_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["Coordinate aware implicit neural representation for UAV small object detection"],"prefix":"10.1371","volume":"21","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0002-6236-9850","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Yong","family":"Yang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Tianci","family":"Wan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Ling","family":"Guo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Menglu","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"340","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,10]]},"reference":[{"key":"pone.0350990.ref001","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"129346","DOI":"10.1016\/j.eswa.2025.129346","article-title":"Density-guided two-stage small object detection in UAV images","volume":"297","author":"B Xie","year":"2026","journal-title":"Expert Systems with Applications"},{"issue":"7","key":"pone.0350990.ref002","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2190","DOI":"10.3390\/s25072190","article-title":"SF-DETR: A Scale-Frequency Detection Transformer for Drone-View Object Detection","volume":"25","author":"H Wang","year":"2025","journal-title":"Sensors (Basel)"},{"key":"pone.0350990.ref003","unstructured":"Wang Y, Bai X, Hu B, Xu C, Chen H, Chung V. MGDFIS: Multi-scale Global-detail Feature Integration Strategy for Small Object Detection. 2025. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.48550\/arXiv.250612697"},{"issue":"11","key":"pone.0350990.ref004","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1920","DOI":"10.3390\/rs17111920","article-title":"AUHF-DETR: A Lightweight Transformer with Spatial Attention and Wavelet Convolution for Embedded UAV Small Object Detection","volume":"17","author":"H Guo","year":"2025","journal-title":"Remote Sensing"},{"key":"pone.0350990.ref005","first-page":"7462","article-title":"Implicit neural representations with periodic activation functions","volume":"33","author":"V Sitzmann","year":"2020","journal-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems"},{"key":"pone.0350990.ref006","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cao Q, Tang Z, Tang X. TPG-INR: Target Prior-Guided Implicit 3D CT Reconstruction for Enhanced Sparse-View Imaging. In: 2025 IEEE\/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025. 28239\u201348. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1109\/iccv51701.2025.02622","DOI":"10.1109\/ICCV51701.2025.02622"},{"issue":"1","key":"pone.0350990.ref007","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"736","DOI":"10.1038\/s41746-025-02041-y","article-title":"ShapeField-lung: continuous shape embedding for early lung cancer detection via pulmonary nodule segmentation","volume":"8","author":"X Gu","year":"2025","journal-title":"NPJ Digit Med"},{"key":"pone.0350990.ref008","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cao B, Yao H, Zhu P, Hu Q. Visible and clear: Finding tiny objects in difference map. In: European Conference on Computer Vision. Springer. 2024. 1\u201318.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-031-72643-9_1"},{"issue":"22","key":"pone.0350990.ref009","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"4265","DOI":"10.3390\/rs16224265","article-title":"Small Object Detection in UAV Remote Sensing Images Based on Intra-Group Multi-Scale Fusion Attention and Adaptive Weighted Feature Fusion Mechanism","volume":"16","author":"Z Yuan","year":"2024","journal-title":"Remote Sensing"},{"key":"pone.0350990.ref010","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1109\/TGRS.2025.3614370","article-title":"CAEM-DETR: Small Aerial Target Detection via Contrastive Attention-Enhanced Multidomain Fidelity Fusion","volume":"63","author":"Z Han","year":"2025","journal-title":"IEEE Trans Geosci Remote Sensing"},{"issue":"4","key":"pone.0350990.ref011","article-title":"LMSFA-YOLO: A lightweight target detection network in Remote sensing images based on Multiscale feature fusion","volume":"37","author":"Y Chu","year":"2025","journal-title":"J King Saud Univ Comput Inf Sci"},{"issue":"3","key":"pone.0350990.ref012","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"351","DOI":"10.3390\/rs17030351","article-title":"DVR: Towards Accurate Hyperspectral Image Classifier via Discrete Vector Representation","volume":"17","author":"J Li","year":"2025","journal-title":"Remote Sensing"},{"issue":"6","key":"pone.0350990.ref013","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1007\/s00530-025-02035-6","article-title":"Wavelet-guided spatial-frequency transformer with physics-based refinement for remote sensing image dehazing","volume":"31","author":"M Miao","year":"2025","journal-title":"Multimedia Systems"},{"issue":"11","key":"pone.0350990.ref014","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"4536","DOI":"10.1109\/TMI.2025.3579213","article-title":"Rethinking Brain Tumor Segmentation From the Frequency Domain Perspective","volume":"44","author":"M Shao","year":"2025","journal-title":"IEEE Trans Med Imaging"},{"issue":"10","key":"pone.0350990.ref015","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"4629","DOI":"10.1109\/TIV.2024.3488035","article-title":"Instance Embedding as Queries for DETR-Based LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation","volume":"10","author":"N-Q Ha-Phan","year":"2025","journal-title":"IEEE Trans Intell Veh"},{"issue":"24","key":"pone.0350990.ref016","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"8066","DOI":"10.3390\/s24248066","article-title":"GeometryFormer: Semi-Convolutional Transformer Integrated with Geometric Perception for Depth Completion in Autonomous Driving Scenes","volume":"24","author":"S Su","year":"2024","journal-title":"Sensors (Basel)"},{"issue":"05","key":"pone.0350990.ref017","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1117\/1.APN.3.5.056005","article-title":"NeuPh: scalable and generalizable neural phase retrieval with local conditional neural fields","volume":"3","author":"H Wang","year":"2024","journal-title":"Adv Photon Nexus"},{"key":"pone.0350990.ref018","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wang J, Yang W, Guo H, Zhang R, Xia G-S. Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images. In: 2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2021. 3791\u20138. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1109\/icpr48806.2021.9413340","DOI":"10.1109\/ICPR48806.2021.9413340"},{"key":"pone.0350990.ref019","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Du D, Qi Y, Yu H, Yang Y, Duan K, Li G, et al. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking. arXiv preprint arXiv:180400518. 2018.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-01249-6_23"},{"key":"pone.0350990.ref020","unstructured":"Zhu P, Wen L, Bian X, Ling H, Hu Q. Vision meets drones: A challenge. In: 2018. https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1804.07437"},{"issue":"2","key":"pone.0350990.ref021","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"303","DOI":"10.1007\/s11263-009-0275-4","article-title":"The Pascal Visual Object Classes (VOC) Challenge","volume":"88","author":"M Everingham","year":"2009","journal-title":"Int J Comput Vis"}],"container-title":["PLOS One"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dx.plos.org\/10.1371\/journal.pone.0350990","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,10]],"date-time":"2026-06-10T17:38:48Z","timestamp":1781113128000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dx.plos.org\/10.1371\/journal.pone.0350990"}},"subtitle":[],"editor":[{"given":"Zhiyuan","family":"Ren","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"editor"}]}],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,10]]},"references-count":21,"journal-issue":{"issue":"6","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,10]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1371\/journal.pone.0350990","relation":{},"ISSN":["1932-6203"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1932-6203","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,10]]}}}