Small Target Detection Research Articles

GPAC-YOLOv8: lightweight target detection for fire scenarios

Abstract Due to the large number of parameters in the deep network model, it is difficult for existing fire detection methods to adapt to limited hardware configurations. In addition, detecting targets in the early stages of a fire is challenging owing to their small size. Therefore, this study presents a novel fire and smoke detection framework called GPAC-YOLOv8, which is based on the YOLOv8 architecture. Firstly, the integration of the ghost module and the Polarized Self-Attention attention mechanism into the backbone culminates in the CGP module, which is designed to improve computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. Next, an innovative feature fusion module, AC-Neck, is developed through the application of the adaptive spatial feature fusion strategy and the lightweight content-aware reassembly of features upsampling mechanism, aiming to optimize feature map fusion and increase small target detection efficiency. Finally, a Focal-WIoU loss function, augmented with a dual weighting mechanism, is formulated to precisely delineate the aspect ratios of the predicted bounding boxes, thereby strengthening the generalization capacity of the model. Experimental results, derived from the application of the proposed GEAC-YOLOv8 method to a specially constructed dataset, show significant improvements in detection speed while maintaining detection accuracy compared to conventional methods. Thus, the GPAC-YOLOv8 framework demonstrably improves the effectiveness of object detection in fire and smoke scenarios.

M-YOLOv8s: An improved small target detection algorithm for UAV aerial photography

The object of UAV target detection usually means small target with complicated backgrounds. In this paper, an object detection model M-YOLOv8s based on UAV aerial photography scene is proposed. Firstly, to solve the problem that the YOLOv8s model cannot adapt to small target detection, a small target detection head (STDH) module is introduced to fuse the location and appearance feature information of the shallow layers of the backbone network. Secondly, Inner-Wise intersection over union (Inner-WIoU) is designed as the boundary box regression loss, and auxiliary boundary calculation is used to accelerate the regression speed of the model. Thirdly, the structure of multi-scale feature pyramid network (MS-FPN) can effectively combine the shallow network information with the deep network information and improve the performance of the detection model. Furthermore, a multi-scale cross-spatial attention (MCSA) module is proposed to expand the feature space through multi-scale branch, and then achieves the aggregation of target features through cross-spatial interaction, which improves the ability of the model to extract target features. Finally, the experimental results show that our model does not only possess fewer parameters, but also the values of mAP0.5 are 6.6% and 5.4% higher than the baseline model on the Visdrone2019 validation dataset and test dataset, respectively. Then, as a conclusion, the M-YOLOv8s model achieves better detection performance than some existing ones, indicating that our proposed method can be more suitable for detecting the small targets.

YOLOv8-E: An Improved YOLOv8 Algorithm for Eggplant Disease Detection

During the developmental stages, eggplants are susceptible to diseases, which can impact crop yields and farmers’ economic returns. Therefore, timely and effective detection of eggplant diseases is crucial. Deep learning-based object detection algorithms can automatically extract features from images of eggplants affected by diseases. However, eggplant disease images captured in complex farmland environments present challenges such as varying disease sizes, occlusion, overlap, and small target detection, making it difficult for existing deep-learning models to achieve satisfactory detection performance. To address this challenge, this study proposed an optimized eggplant disease detection algorithm, YOLOv8-E, based on You Only Look Once version 8 nano (YOLOv8n). Firstly, we integrate switchable atrous convolution (SAConv) into the C2f module to design the C2f_SAConv module, replacing some of the C2f modules in the backbone network of YOLOv8n, enabling our proposed algorithm to better extract eggplant disease features. Secondly, to facilitate the deployment of the detection model on mobile devices, we reconstruct the Neck network of YOLOv8n using the SlimNeck module, making the model lighter. Additionally, to tackle the issue of missing small targets, we embed the large separable kernel attention (LSKA) module within SlimNeck, enhancing the model’s attention to fine-grained information. Lastly, we combined intersection over union with auxiliary bounding box (Inner-IoU) and minimum point distance intersection over union (MPDIoU), introducing the Inner-MPDIoU loss to speed up convergence of the model and raise detection precision of overlapped and occluded targets. Ablation studies demonstrated that, compared to YOLOv8n, the mean average precision (mAP) and F1 score of YOLOv8-E reached 79.4% and 75.7%, respectively, which obtained a 5.5% increment and a 4.5% increase, while also reducing the model size and computational complexity. Furthermore, YOLOv8-E achieved higher detection performance than other mainstream algorithms. YOLOv8-E exhibits significant potential for practical application in eggplant disease detection.

G-YOLO: A Lightweight Infrared Aerial Remote Sensing Target Detection Model for UAVs Based on YOLOv8

A lightweight infrared target detection model, G-YOLO, based on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed to address the issues of low accuracy in target detection of UAV aerial images in complex ground scenarios and large network models that are difficult to apply to mobile or embedded platforms. Firstly, the YOLOv8 backbone feature extraction network is improved and designed based on the lightweight network, GhostBottleneckV2, and the remaining part of the backbone network adopts the depth-separable convolution, DWConv, to replace part of the standard convolution, which effectively retains the detection effect of the model while greatly reducing the number of model parameters and calculations. Secondly, the neck structure is improved by the ODConv module, which adopts an adaptive convolutional structure to adaptively adjust the convolutional kernel size and step size, which allows for more effective feature extraction and detection based on targets at different scales. At the same time, the neck structure is further optimized using the attention mechanism, SEAttention, to improve the model’s ability to learn global information of input feature maps, which is then applied to each channel of each feature map to enhance the useful information in a specific channel and improve the model’s detection performance. Finally, the introduction of the SlideLoss loss function enables the model to calculate the differences between predicted and actual truth bounding boxes during the training process, and adjust the model parameters based on these differences to improve the accuracy and efficiency of object detection. The experimental results show that compared with YOLOv8n, the G-YOLO reduces the missed and false detection rates of infrared small target detection in complex backgrounds. The number of model parameters is reduced by 74.2%, the number of computational floats is reduced by 54.3%, the FPS is improved by 71, which improves the detection efficiency of the model, and the average accuracy (mAP) reaches 91.4%, which verifies the validity of the model for UAV-based infrared small target detection. Furthermore, the FPS of the model reaches 556, and it will be suitable for wider and more complex detection task such as small targets, long-distance targets, and other complex scenes.

Sea clutter prediction based on fusion of Fourier transform and graph neural network

ABSTRACT Radar is a crucial tool for remote sensing and monitoring of marine environments. However, its effectiveness is significantly influenced by sea clutter. The complex interplay between radar parameters and various maritime environmental factors gives rise to a dynamic and intricate sea clutter pattern. The conventional approach to sea clutter prediction only considers the temporal dependence, neglecting the spatial changes. To address this limitation, this study proposes the Fusion of Fourier Transform and Graph Neural Network (FFTaGNN) to enhance the accuracy of multi-dimensional sea clutter data forecasting. FFTaGNN captures the correlations and time dependencies among sequences in the spectral domain. By combining the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and graph Fourier transform (GFT), it extracts the temporal correlation characteristics and establishes correlations between multidimensional sea clutter data sequences. Importantly, FFTaGNN can automatically discover data correlations between sequences without relying on predetermined priors. To validate the effectiveness of the model, an experimental verification process is conducted, considering different grazing angles and sea clutter High Range Resolution Profile (HRRP) data. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the proposed strategy achieves a minimum Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.0574 in predicting sea clutter HRRP data. This technique holds great potential in effectively suppressing sea clutter, thereby enhancing the overall performance of radar systems in marine environments and small target detection capabilities at the sea surface.

Research on Improved Algorithms for Cone Bucket Detection in Formula Unmanned Competition.

The model network based on YOLOv8 for detecting race cones and buckets in the Formula Unmanned Competition for Chinese university students needs help with problems with complex structure, redundant number of parameters, and computation, significantly affecting detection efficiency. A lightweight detection model based on YOLOv8 is proposed to address these problems. The model includes improving the backbone network, neck network, and detection head, as well as introducing knowledge distillation and other techniques to construct a lightweight model. The specific improvements are as follows: firstly, the backbone network for extracting features is improved by introducing the ADown module in YOLOv9 to replace the convolution module used for downsampling in the YOLOv8 network, and secondly, the FasterBlock in FasterNet network was introduced to replace the fusion module in YOLOv8 C2f, and then the self-developed lightweight detection head was introduced to improve the detection performance while achieving lightweight. Finally, the detection performance was further improved by knowledge distillation. The experimental results on the public dataset FSACOCO show that the improved model's accuracy, recall, and average precision are 92.7%, 84.6%, and 91%, respectively. Compared with the original YOLOv8n detection model, the recall and average precision increase by 2.7 and 1.2 percentage points, the memory is half the original, and the model computation is 51%. The model significantly reduces the misdetection and leakage of conical buckets in real-vehicle tests and, at the same time, ensures the detection speed to satisfy the deployment requirements on tiny devices. Satisfies all the requirements for deployment of tiny devices in the race car of the China University Student Driverless Formula Competition. The improved method in this paper can be applied to conebucket detection in complex scenarios, and the improved idea can be carried over to the detection of other small targets.

An Improved Lightweight YOLOv8 Network for Early Small Flame Target Detection

An Improved Lightweight YOLOv8 Network for Early Small Flame Target Detection

Lightweight and Efficient Wheat Spike Detection for Small Targets

Lightweight and Efficient Wheat Spike Detection for Small Targets

Improved YOLOv8 Remote Sensing Small Target Detection Method

Due to the miniaturization, dense arrangement, variable viewing Angle and complexity of background environment in satellite remote sensing technology, the traditional detection methods often encounter the challenge of misidentification and missing detection, thus limiting the detection accuracy. In order to overcome these problems and improve detection efficiency, this paper innovatively proposes an optimized Yolov8 model, which is deeply customized and improved for the detection of tiny objects in remote sensing images. Firstly, BiFormer model is introduced. BiFormer model introduces a two-layer routing attention mechanism, which significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of target detection. In addition, the SPD-Conv module is introduced to realize the conversion from space to depth, and better capture the target features of different dimensions. After rigorous validation of the DOTA-v1.0 dataset, the optimized model achieved a significant improvement in average accuracy (mAP), reaching a level of excellence of 60.3%, which represents a performance leap of about 2.3 percentage points compared to traditional models. It has further promoted the technological progress and application deepening in this field.

Evaluation of cucumber seed germination vigor under salt stress environment based on improved YOLOv8.

Seed germination vigor is one of the important indexes reflecting the quality of seeds, and the level of its germination vigor directly affects the crop yield. The traditional manual determination of seed germination vigor is inefficient, subjective, prone to damage the seed structure, cumbersome and with large errors. We carried out a cucumber seed germination experiment under salt stress based on the seed germination phenotype acquisition platform. We obtained image data of cucumber seed germination under salt stress conditions. On the basis of the YOLOv8-n model, the original loss function CIoU_Loss was replaced by ECIOU_Loss, and the Coordinate Attention(CA) mechanism was added to the head network, which helped the model locate and identify the target. The small-target detection head was added, which enhanced the detection accuracy of the tiny target. The precision P, recall R, and mAP of detection of the model improved from the original values of 91.6%, 85.4%, and 91.8% to 96.9%, 97.3%, and 98.9%, respectively. Based on the improved YOLOv8-ECS model, cucumber seeds under different concentrations of salt stress were detected by target detection, cucumber seed germination rate, germination index and other parameters were calculated, the root length of cucumber seeds during germination was extracted and analyzed, and the change characteristics of root length during cucumber seed germination were obtained, and finally the germination activity of cucumber seeds under different concentrations of salt stress was evaluated. This work provides a simple and efficient method for the selection and breeding of salt-tolerant varieties of cucumber.

5-D spatial–temporal information-based infrared small target detection in complex environments

Recently, infrared (IR) small target detection problem has attracted increasing attention. Tensor component analysis-based techniques have been widely utilized, while they are faced with challenges such as tensor structures, background and target estimation, and real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a 5-D spatial–temporal factor-based completion model (5D-STFC) for IR small target detection. Specifically, a 5-D whitened spatial–temporal patch-tensor is constructed. Then, we devise a spatial–temporal factor-based low-rank background estimation norm and a Moreau envelope-derived sparsity estimation norm based on joint spatial–temporal knowledge. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive completion model for component analysis. To efficiently solve this model, we design a multi-block alternating direction method of multipliers (multi-block ADMM)-based optimization scheme. Extensive experiments conducted on five real IR sequences demonstrate the superiority of 5D-STFC over nine state-of-the-art competitive methods. It can be concluded that 5D-STFC is excellent and practical in target detectability, background suppressibility, overall performance, and real-time performance.

Lightweight Substation Equipment Defect Detection Algorithm for Small Targets.

Substation equipment defect detection has always played an important role in equipment operation and maintenance. However, the task scenarios of substation equipment defect detection are complex and different. Recent studies have revealed issues such as a significant missed detection rate for small-sized targets and diminished detection precision. At the same time, the current mainstream detection algorithms are highly complex, which is not conducive to deployment on resource-constrained devices. In view of the above problems, a small target and lightweight substation main scene equipment defect detection algorithm is proposed: Efficient Attentional Lightweight-YOLO (EAL-YOLO), which detection accuracy exceeds the current mainstream model, and the number of parameters and floating point operations (FLOPs) are also advantageous. Firstly, the EfficientFormerV2 is used to optimize the model backbone, and the Large Separable Kernel Attention (LSKA) mechanism has been incorporated into the Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast (SPPF) to enhance the model's feature extraction capabilities; secondly, a small target neck network Attentional scale Sequence Fusion P2-Neck (ASF2-Neck) is proposed to enhance the model's ability to detect small target defects; finally, in order to facilitate deployment on resource-constrained devices, a lightweight shared convolution detection head module Lightweight Shared Convolutional Head (LSCHead) is proposed. Experiments show that compared with YOLOv8n, EAL-YOLO has improved its accuracy by 2.93 percentage points, and the mAP50 of 12 types of typical equipment defects has reached 92.26%. Concurrently, the quantity of FLOPs and parameters has diminished by 46.5% and 61.17% respectively, in comparison with YOLOv8s, meeting the needs of substation defect detection.

Lung-YOLO: Multiscale feature fusion attention and cross-layer aggregation for lung nodule detection

ObjectiveLung cancer is a significant public health problem worldwide, and its mortality and morbidity rates are among the highest of cancers. At the same time, early diagnosis of nodules can significantly improve the survival rate of patients. Therefore, this paper proposes the Lung-YOLO algorithm for lung CT image detection based on YOLOv6. MethodsFirst, to enable the network to detect nodules of different sizes and to minimize missed detections, we introduce the Multi-scale Dual-branch Attention (MSDA) mechanism in the feature extraction part of the network. The input features undergo continual dilation convolutions, effectively establish remote dependencies, and the fused multiscale contextual information expands the receptive field while enhancing the model’s ability to detect targets of different sizes, which not only contains precise category and location information but also enables the allocation of attentional weights to generate more pixel-level attention. Then, the fused features access the dual-branch attention module to shift the model’s attention to the target nodules, and the composed dual-branch structure captures cross-dimensional interactions and realizes inter-dimensional dependencies, effectively improving the detection performance. Second, during the feature transfer process, the original Bidirectional Feature Pyramid structure (RepBiFPAN) suffers from the loss of detailed information such as texture and color, making it challenging to localize target nodules accurately. To address this, we propose the Cross-layer Aggregation Module (CLAM), by cross-layer aggregating the multi-level feature layer of the backbone with the multi-level detection layer of the head, which preserves the multi-level fine-grained information that may be lost during the feature transfer process, which is crucial for the detection of small targets. Finally, the module proposed in this paper can be easily incorporated into any detection framework for plug-and-play. ResultsOur method achieves accuracy, precision, recall, and mAP of 97.5 %, 96.5 %, 96.9 %, and 97.9 % on the LUNA16 dataset, and 95.1 %, 94.3 %, 93.4 %, and 95.9 % on the LIDC-IDRI dataset, respectively, surpassing many existing state-of-the-art detection methods. Moreover, the inference speed is 22.8 ms and 28.4 ms per image with 30.6 M parameters, respectively.

HRTracker: Multi-Object Tracking in Satellite Video Enhanced by High-Resolution Feature Fusion and an Adaptive Data Association

Multi-object tracking in satellite videos (SV-MOT) is an important task with many applications, such as traffic monitoring and disaster response. However, the widely studied multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches for general images can rarely be directly introduced into remote sensing scenarios. The main reasons for this can be attributed to the following: (1) the existing MOT approaches would cause a significant rate of missed detection of the small targets in satellite videos; (2) it is difficult for the general MOT approaches to generate complete trajectories in complex satellite scenarios. To address these problems, a novel SV-MOT approach enhanced by high-resolution feature fusion and a two-step association method is proposed. In the high-resolution detection network, a high-resolution feature fusion module is designed to assist detection by maintaining small object features in forward propagation. By utilizing features of different resolutions, the performance of the detection of small targets in satellite videos is improved. Through high-quality detection and the use of an adaptive Kalman filter, the densely packed weak objects can be effectively tracked by associating almost every detection box instead of only the high-score ones. The comprehensive experimental results using the representative satellite video datasets (VISO) demonstrate that the proposed HRTracker with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods can achieve competitive performance in terms of the tracking accuracy and the frequency of ID conversion, obtaining a tracking accuracy score of 74.6% and an ID F1 score of 78.9%.

Cotton-YOLO-Seg: An Enhanced YOLOV8 Model for Impurity Rate Detection in Machine-Picked Seed Cotton

The detection of the impurity rate in machine-picked seed cotton is crucial for precision agriculture. This study proposes a novel Cotton-YOLO-Seg cotton-impurity instance segmentation algorithm based on the you only look once version 8 small segmentation model (Yolov8s-Seg). The algorithm achieves precise pixel-level segmentation of cotton and impurities in seed cotton images and establishes a detection model for the impurity rate, enabling accurate detection of the impurity rate in machine-picked cotton. The proposed algorithm removes the Pyramid 4 (P4) feature layer and incorporates Multi-Scale Convolutional Block Attention (MSCBCA) that integrates the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and Multi-Scale Convolutional Attention (MSCA) into the Faster Implementation of Cross Stage Partial Bottleneck with 2 Convolutions (C2f) module of the feature extraction network, forming a novel C2f_MSCBCA module. The SlimNeck structure is introduced in the feature fusion network by replacing the P4 feature layer with the small-target detection layer Pyramid 2 (P2). Additionally, transfer learning is employed using the Common Objects in Context (COCO) instance segmentation dataset. The analysis of 100 groups of cotton image samples shows that the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) for impurity rate detection are 0.29%, 0.33%, and 3.70%, respectively, which are reduced by 52.46%, 48.44%, and 53.75% compared to the Yolov8s-seg model. The Precision (P), Recall (R), and mean Average Precision at an intersection over union of 0.5 (mAP@0.5) are 85.4%, 78.4%, and 80.8%, respectively, which are improved by 4.2%, 6.2%, and 6.4% compared to Yolov8s-seg model, significantly enhancing the segmentation performance of minor impurities. The Cotton-YOLO-Seg model demonstrates practical significance for precisely detecting the impurity rate in machine-picked seed cotton.

Infrared Weak and Small Target Detection Algorithm Based on Deep Learning

Abstract In the infrared imaging scene where the target is at a long distance and the background is cluttered, due to the interference of noise and background texture information, the infrared image is prone to problems such as low contrast between the target and the background, and feature confusion, which makes it difficult to accurately extract and detect the target. To solve this problem, firstly, the infrared image is enhanced by combining DDE and MSR algorithm to improve the contrast and detail visibility of the image. For the RT-DETR network structure, the EMA attention mechanism is introduced into the backbone to enhance the feature extraction ability of the model by extracting context information. The CAMixing convolutional attention module is introduced into CCFM, and the multi-scale convolutional self-attention mechanism is introduced to focus on local information and enhance the detection ability of small targets. The filtering rules of the prediction box are improved, combined with Shape-IoU, and the convergence speed of the loss function in the detection and the detection accuracy of small targets are improved by paying attention to the influence of the intrinsic properties of the bounding box itself on the regression. In the experiment, the infrared weak target image dataset of the National University of Defense Technology was selected, labeled and trained. Experimental results show that compared with the original DETR algorithm, the average precision of the improved algorithm (mAP) is increased by 3.2%, and it can effectively detect infrared weak and small targets in different complex backgrounds, which reflects good robustness and adaptability, and can be effectively applied to infrared weak and small target detection in complex backgrounds.

Sea Surface Small Target Detection on One-Dimensional Sequential Signal

Sea Surface Small Target Detection on One-Dimensional Sequential Signal

CSI-Net: CNN Swin Transformer Integrated Network for Infrared Small Target Detection

CSI-Net: CNN Swin Transformer Integrated Network for Infrared Small Target Detection

Improved Pedestrian Vehicle Detection for Small Objects Based on Attention Mechanism

Abstract This study aims to solve the low detection accuracy and susceptibility to false detection and omission in pedestrian and vehicle detection by proposing an improved YOLOv5s algorithm. Firstly, a small target detection module is added to better acquire and determine the information of pedestrians from long-range vehicles. Secondly, the multi-scale channel attention CBAM attention module is added, and the dual attention mechanism is not only flexible and convenient, but also improves the computational efficiency. Finally, the MPDIoU loss function based on minimum point distance is introduced to replace the original GIoU loss function, and this change not only enhances the regression accuracy of the model. At the same time, the convergence speed of the model is accelerated. KITTI data set was used for experiments, and the experimental results showed that the average accuracy of the model trained by the improved YOLOv5s algorithm on the data set reached 84.9%, which was 3.7% higher than that of the original YOLOv5s algorithm. It is verified that the model is suitable for high accuracy of pedestrian and vehicle recognition in complex environments, and has high value for promotion.

PRE-YOLO: A Lightweight Model for Detecting Helmet-Wearing of Electric Vehicle Riders on Complex Traffic Roads

Electric vehicle accidents on the road occur frequently, and head injuries are often the cause of serious casualties. However, most electric vehicle riders seldom wear helmets. Therefore, combining target detection algorithms with road cameras to intelligently monitor helmet-wearing has extremely important research significance. Therefore, a helmet-wearing detection algorithm based on the improved YOLOv8n model, PRE-YOLO, is proposed. First, we add small target detection layers and prune large target detection layers. The sophisticated algorithm considerably boosts the effectiveness of data manipulation while significantly reducing model parameters and size. Secondly, we introduce a convolutional module that integrates receptive field attention convolution and CA mechanisms into the backbone network, enhancing feature extraction capabilities by enhancing attention weights within both channel and spatial aspects. Lastly, we incorporate an EMA mechanism into the C2f module, which strengthens feature perception and captures more characteristic information while maintaining the same model parameter size. The experimental outcomes indicate that in comparison to the original model, the proposed PRE-YOLO model in this paper has improved by 1.3%, 1.7%, 2.2%, and 2.6% in terms of precision P, recall R, mAP@0.5, and mAP@0.5:0.95, respectively. At the same time, the number of model parameters has been reduced by 33.3%, and the model size has been reduced by 1.8 MB. Generalization experiments are conducted on the TWHD and EBHD datasets to further verify the versatility of the model. The research findings provide solutions for further improving the accuracy and efficiency of helmet-wearing detection on complex traffic roads, offering references for enhancing safety and intelligence in traffic.