Wind Turbines Small Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on CGA-YOLO: A Case Study in Shandong Province, China

With the rapid development of high-resolution satellite remote sensing technology, wind turbine detection based on remote sensing imagery has emerged as a crucial research area in renewable energy. However, accurate identification of wind turbines remains challenging due to complex geographical backgrounds and their typical appearance as small objects in images, where limited features and background interference hinder detection performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes CGA-YOLO, a specialized network for detecting small targets in high-resolution remote sensing images, and constructs the SDWT dataset, containing Gaofen-2 imagery covering various terrains in Shandong Province, China. The network incorporates three key enhancements: dynamic convolution improves multi-scale feature representation for precise localization; the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) enhances feature convergence through channel and spatial attention mechanisms; and GhostBottleneck maintains high-resolution details while strengthening feature channels for small targets. Experimental results demonstrate that CGA-YOLO achieves an F1-score of 0.93 and an mAP50 of 0.938 on the SDWT dataset, and obtains an mAP50 of 0.9033 on both RSOD and VEDAI public datasets. CGA-YOLO establishes its superior accuracy over multiple mainstream detection models under identical experimental conditions, confirming its potential as a reliable technical solution for accurate wind turbine identification in complex environments.