YOLO-Ant: A Lightweight Detector via Depthwise Separable Convolutional and Large Kernel Design for Antenna Interference Source Detection

In the era of 5G communication, removing interference sources that affect communication is a resource-intensive task. The rapid development of computer vision has enabled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to perform various high-altitude detection tasks. Because the field of object detection for antenna interference sources has not been fully explored, this industry lacks dedicated learning samples and detection models for this specific task. In this article, an antenna dataset is created to address important antenna interference source detection issues and serves as the basis for subsequent research. We introduce YOLO-Ant, a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformer hybrid detector specifically designed for antenna interference source detection. Specifically, we initially formulated a lightweight design for the network depth and width, ensuring that subsequent investigations were conducted within a lightweight framework. Then, we propose a DSLK-Block module based on depthwise separable convolution and large convolution kernels to enhance the network’s feature extraction ability, effectively improving small object detection. To address challenges such as complex backgrounds and large interclass differences in antenna detection, we construct DSLKVit-Block, a powerful feature extraction module that combines DSLK-Block and transformer structures. Considering both its lightweight design and accuracy, our method not only achieves optimal performance on the antenna dataset but also yields competitive results on public datasets.