HGSQ: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for Real-Time Aerial Small Object Detection

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Real-time aerial small object detection is an important visual signal and image processing problem, requiring a detector to preserve fine-grained localization while avoiding redundant computation on large background regions. This paper focuses on this deployment-oriented aerial/UAV setting rather than claiming a universal detector for all object detection scenarios. Existing Transformer-based detectors provide strong global modeling, but their dense query initialization and multi-layer decoder still spend substantial computation on background tokens, which is inefficient when small objects occupy only sparse image regions. To address this problem, this paper proposes HGSQ, a Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for real-time aerial small object detection. HGSQ uses a lightweight Heatmap Budget Predictor (HBP) to predict a foreground budget map in a single forward pass. The predicted heatmap is then used by three fixed components: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Selection (HSQS), which initializes decoder queries from high-confidence foreground positions; Heatmap-Gated Lite Snake Convolution (HGLSConv), which performs local shape refinement only on heatmap-activated small-object regions; and Adaptive Query-Decoder Budgeting (AQDB), which adjusts the query budget and decoder depth according to the estimated object density. Unlike post-hoc heatmap generation, HGSQ treats the heatmap as a real-time computation budget rather than a visualization map during deployment. Experiments on NWPU VHR-10 and VisDrone2019 show that HGSQ achieves 95.10 mAP50 on NWPU VHR-10 and 54.8 mAP50 on VisDrone2019, while reducing GFLOPs to 48.6 and running at 96.0 FPS on an RTX 4070 under our TensorRT FP16 deployment protocol.