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Automatic driving requires real-time consideration for traffic sign target detection algorithms while ensuring the accuracy. However, the current one-stage target detection algorithm mainly used for real-time detection is not focused on the characteristics of traffic signs, and the relevant research is insufficient. Aiming at this problem and ensure the accuracy of light-weight network in traffic sign detection task, an improved lightweight traffic sign recognition algorithm based on YOLOv4-Tiny was proposed, with improved backbone feature extraction and detection head using CBAM attention mechanism and depth-wise separable convolution, known as CDYOLO. Based on CDYOLO, we further proposed CDYOLO-SP, which can perform well in complex multi-category detection tasks. In terms of training methods, we adopt the transfer learning mode of "CCTSDB + TT100K" to improve performance. Compared with the original YOLOv4-Tiny, the improved algorithm has achieved better results. In the CCTSDB three-classification task, the mAP of CDYOLO improved by 6.52% and FPS maintained at about 82.5 FPS. The model size is only 4.1 MB. In the TT100K complex multi-classification task, the mAP of CDYOLO-SP improved by 48.59% and FPS maintained at about 60.2 FPS, and the model size is only 10.0 MB. Furthermore, the experiments show that compared with different CNN-based methods our methods outperforms them significantly. In summary, the improved model can meet the accuracy and real-time requirements of traffic sign detection and can be deployed on low-performance devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the emergence of the new generation vision architecture Vmamba and the further demand for agricultural yield and efficiency, we propose an efficient and high-accuracy target detection network for automated pear picking tasks based on Vmamba, aiming to address the issue of low efficiency in current Transformer architectures. The proposed network, named SRSMamba, employs a Reward and Punishment Mechanism (RPM) to focus on important information while minimizing redundancy interference. It utilizes 3D Selective Scan (SS3D) to extend scanning dimensions and integrates global information across channel dimensions, thereby enhancing the model's robustness in complex agricultural environments and effectively adapting to the extraction of complex features in pear orchards and farmlands. Additionally, a Stacked Feature Pyramid Network (SFPN) is introduced to enhance semantic information during the feature fusion stage, particularly improving the detection capability for small targets. Experimental results show that SRSMamba has a low parameter count of 21.1 M, GFLOPs of 50.4, mAP of 72.0%, mAP50 reaching 94.8%, mAP75 at 68.1%, and FPS at 26.9. Compared with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection methods, it achieves a good trade-off between model efficiency and detection accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract With the emergence of the new generation vision architecture Vmamba and the further demand for agricultural yield and efficiency, we propose an efficient and high-accuracy target detection network for automated pear picking tasks based on Vmamba, aiming to address the issue of low efficiency in current Transformer architectures. The proposed network, named SRSMamba, employs a Reward and Punishment Mechanism (RPM) to focus on important information while minimizing redundancy interference. It utilizes 3D Selective Scan (SS3D) to extend scanning dimensions and integrates global information across channel dimensions, thereby enhancing the model's robustness in complex agricultural environments and effectively adapting to the extraction of complex features in pear orchards and farmlands. Additionally, a Stacked Feature Pyramid Network (SFPN) is introduced to enhance semantic information during the feature fusion stage, particularly improving the detection capability for small targets. Experimental results show that SRSMamba has a low parameter count of 21.1 M, GFLOPs of 50.4, mAP of 72.0%, mAP50 reaching 94.8%, mAP75 at 68.1%, and FPS at 26.9. Compared with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection methods, it achieves a good trade-off between model efficiency and detection accuracy.

Sonar automatic target recognition (ATR) systems suffer from complex acoustic scattering, background clutter, and waveguide effects that are ever-present in the ocean. Traditional signal processing techniques often struggle to distinguish targets when noise and complicated target geometries are introduced. Recent advancements in machine learning and wavelet theory offer promising directions for extracting informative features from sonar return data. This work introduces a feature extraction and dimensionality reduction technique using the invariant scattering transform and Sparse Multi-view Discriminant Analysis for identifying highly informative features in the PONDEX09/PONDEX10 datasets. The extracted features are used to train a support vector machine classifier that achieves an average classification accuracy of 97.3% using six unique targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the challenges posed by noise and varying target scales in SAR images, conventional convolutional neural networks often underperform in SAR image detection. To address this, this paper introduces a novel approach. Firstly, a Res-Clo network is proposed for denoising SAR images as a preprocessing step to enhance detection accuracy. Subsequently, an improved network, DML-YOLOv8, is devised based on the YOLOv8 network. The enhancements in the proposed algorithm include several key modifications. Firstly, within the feature extraction layers, a designed MFB module is integrated to effectively broaden the network's receptive field. Next, deformable convolutions are introduced in the feature fusion layers to bolster the network's capability for multi-scale detection. Additionally, a novel loss function, RT-IOU, is designed in feature detection to enhance network inference speed. Finally, a specialized STD small target detection layer is designed to improve detection accuracy for small targets. In practical experiments, it has been shown that the detection method proposed in this paper effectively improves the detection performance of noisy SAR images, and also achieves satisfactory results in multi-scale detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of general target detection algorithms for small-target detection is computationally costly and has a high missed detection rate. A lightweight small-target detection model based on YOLOv5 is proposed to address this issue.First, a maximum pooling layer is introduced to reduce the number of calculations. Second, Shuffle_Conv is designed to replace the ordinary convolutional layer to reduce model parameters. To further compress the model, the Add fusion method is used in the C3 module, while the GAC3 layer is designed with GhostNet. Finally, Mosaic_9 is introduced to improve the small-target detection without increasing the number of calculations. Compared with YOLOv5, computation and parameters of the improved model are reduced by 84.9% and 39.1%, respectively, and the accuracy is improved by 2%, which is more obvious than that of the original model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at real-time detection of UAVs, small UAV targets are easily missed and difficult to detect in complex backgrounds. To maintain high detection performance while reducing memory and computational costs, this paper proposes the SEB-YOLOv8s detection method. Firstly, the YOLOv8 network structure is reconstructed using SPD-Conv to reduce the computational burden and accelerate the processing speed while retaining more shallow features of small targets. Secondly, we design the AttC2f module and replace the C2f module in the backbone of YOLOv8s with it, enhancing the model's ability to obtain accurate information and enriching the extracted relevant information. Finally, Bi-Level Routing Attention is introduced to optimize the Neck part of the network, reducing the model's attention to interfering information and filtering it out. The experimental results show that the mAP50 of the proposed method reaches 90.5 % and the accuracy reaches 95.9 % , which are improvements of 2.2 % and 1.9 % , respectively, compared with the original model. The mAP50-95 is improved by 2.7 % , and the model's occupied memory size only increases by 2.5 MB, effectively achieving high-accuracy real-time detection with low memory consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pests have caused significant losses to agriculture, greatly increasing the detection of pests in the planting process and the cost of pest management in the early stages. At this time, advances in computer vision and deep learning for the detection of pests appearing in the crop open the door to the application of target detection algorithms that can greatly improve the efficiency of tomato pest detection and play an important technical role in the realization of the intelligent planting of tomatoes. However, in the natural environment, tomato leaf pests are small in size, large in similarity, and large in environmental variability, and this type of situation can lead to greater detection difficulty. Aiming at the above problems, a network target detection model based on deep learning, YOLONDD, is proposed in this paper. Designing a new loss function, NMIoU (Normalized Wasserstein Distance with Mean Pairwise Distance Intersection over Union), which improves the ability of anomaly processing, improves the model's ability to detect and identify objects of different scales, and improves the robustness to scale changes; Adding a Dynamic head (DyHead) with an attention mechanism will improve the detection ability of targets at different scales, reduce the number of computations and parameters, improve the accuracy of target detection, enhance the overall performance of the model, and accelerate the training process. Adding decoupled head to Head can effectively reduce the number of parameters and computational complexity and enhance the model's generalization ability and robustness. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of YOLONDD can reach 90.1%, which is 3.33% higher than the original YOLOv5 algorithm and is better than SSD, Faster R-CNN, YOLOv7, YOLOv8, RetinaNet, and other target detection networks, and it can be more efficiently and accurately utilized in tomato leaf pest detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Tea pests pose a significant threat to tea leaf yield and quality, necessitating fast and accurate detection methods to improve pest control efficiency and reduce economic losses for tea farmers. However, in real tea gardens, some tea pests are small in size and easily camouflaged by complex backgrounds, making it challenging for farmers to promptly and accurately identify them. Results: To address this issue, we propose a real‐time detection method based on TP‐YOLOX for monitoring tea pests in complex backgrounds. Our approach incorporates the CSBLayer module, which combines convolution and multi‐head self‐attention mechanisms, to capture global contextual information from images and expand the network's perception field. Additionally, we integrate an efficient multi‐scale attention module to enhance the model's ability to perceive fine details in small targets. To expedite model convergence and improve the precision of target localization, we employ the SIOU loss function as the bounding box regression function. Experimental results demonstrate that TP‐YOLOX achieves a significant performance improvement with a relatively small additional computational cost (0.98 floating‐point operations), resulting in a 4.50% increase in mean average precision (mAP) compared to the original YOLOX‐s. When compared with existing object detection algorithms, TP‐YOLOX outperforms them in terms of mAP performance. Moreover, the proposed method achieves a frame rate of 82.66 frames per second, meeting real‐time requirements. Conclusion: TP‐YOLOX emerges as a proficient solution, capable of accurately and swiftly identifying tea pests amidst the complex backgrounds of tea gardens. This contribution not only offers valuable insights for tea pest monitoring but also serves as a reference for achieving precise pest control. © 2023 Society of Chemical Industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) has experienced fast developments in recent years and been widely applied in civilian and military fields. The long imaging distance and complex backgrounds of infrared images often make the interested targets present in small scales and lack of contour features, which poses great challenges for the detection. Though deep neural network-based methods have been thoroughly investigated in IRSTD, deep layers generally struggle to retain the visual details and positions of small targets, aggravating the miss detection and false alarms. To address the above issue, we propose a Region-Guided Network with visual cues correction (RGNet) for IRSTD. More specifically, we design a Region Guidance Module embedded in shallow layers to generate the foreground mask by leveraging rich visual details contained in low-level features. The obtained mask then guides the re-weighting of deep feature maps to highlight the targets for further localization. Considering noisy signals in backgrounds tend to increase the false alarms of small targets, we propose a Visual Cues Correction Module, which extracts the regional features from low-level features by referring to the predicted positions of initial results, and conducts a binary classification to rule out the negative detection. Since the open-sourced IRSTD datasets are limited, we utilize both public and collected data for the evaluation. Both multi-target and single-target cases are investigated, and comprehensive experimental results indicate that compared to state-of-art models, our method achieves the overall best performance in both scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with thermal infrared (TIR) cameras play a crucial role in combating nocturnal wildlife poaching. However, TIR images often face challenges such as jitter and wildlife overlap, necessitating UAVs to possess the capability to identify blurred and overlapping small targets. Current traditional lightweight networks deployed on UAVs struggle to extract features from blurry small targets. To address this issue, we developed ALSS-YOLO, an efficient and lightweight detector optimized for TIR aerial images. First, we propose a novel adaptive lightweight channel split and shuffling (ALSS) module. This module employs an adaptive channel split strategy to optimize feature extraction and integrates a channel shuffling mechanism to enhance information exchange between channels. This improves the extraction of blurry features, crucial for handling jitter-induced blur and overlapping targets. Second, we developed a lightweight coordinate attention (LCA) module that employs adaptive pooling and grouped convolution to integrate feature information across dimensions. This module ensures lightweight operation while maintaining high detection precision and robustness against jitter and target overlap. Additionally, we developed a single-channel focus module to aggregate the width and height information of each channel into 4-D channel fusion, which improves the feature representation efficiency of infrared images. Finally, we modify the localization loss function to emphasize the loss value associated with small objects to improve localization accuracy. Extensive experiments on the BIRDSAI and ISOD TIR UAV wildlife datasets show that ALSS-YOLO achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) finds widespread applications in environmental monitoring, disaster management, ship surveillance, and military intelligence. However, existing target detection methods are ineffective in SAR scenes due to the intricate background environments, small target displays, and irregular appearances. To address these challenges, this thesis introduces a target detection model named YOLOv8-FDF, tailored for SAR scenes based on the YOLOv8 architecture. The model effectively incorporates the FADC module to distinguish targets from complex backgrounds and integrates a deformable feature adaptive mechanism to focus on irregular targets. Additionally, this thesis devised a specialized detection head designed to identify small targets in SAR-wide scenes, thereby improving the effectiveness of detecting such targets. The proposed YOLOv8-FDF model is evaluated on the HRSID dataset. Experiment results show a 3.6% improvement in Map75 on both the training and test sets. Furthermore, under the COCO standard, the model achieves improvements of 4.1%, 2.9%, and 5.5% on AP, AP50, and AP75, along with 6.8%, 1.2%, and 1.2% improvements on small, medium, and large-sized ship detection. An accuracy enhancement of 6.8%, 1.0%, and 14.9% is achieved. These experimental findings validate the efficacy of the proposed YOLOv8-FDF model in SAR scenarios.

Satellite remote sensing technology significantly contributes to intelligent transportation by optimizing traffic planning via global perspectives and rich data, enhancing traffic efficiency and reducing environmental impact. However, current target detection models frequently exhibit low accuracy in vehicle detection tasks due to complex background interference in satellite imageries and a need for critical semantic information. To improve vehicle target detection accuracy, this study introduces SatDetX-YOLO, a vehicle detection model for satellite remote sensing images based on YOLOv8. The model involves reconstructing the backbone network with FasterNet for enhanced feature extraction, a redesigned decoupled head for improved computational efficiency and complex data processing, and incorporating the Deformable Attention Module (DAM) to increase sensitivity to small targets and feature correlation capture. Employing the Maximum Probabilistic Distance IoU (MPDIoU) loss function enhances adaptability and generalization to diverse vehicle targets. Experimental results demonstrate that under comparable FPS, SatDetX-YOLO’s Precision (P), Recall (R), and Mean Average Precision (mAP) improved by 3.5%, 3.3%, and 3.2%, respectively. Despite a minor reduction in FPS, the model significantly enhances detection accuracy, striking a balance between accuracy and speed.

Classroom learning behavior recognition can provide effective technical support for teaching and learning. However, in natural classroom teaching scenarios, classroom learning behaviors are often missed or falsely detected due to character occlusion and the small object. To tackle the above issues, this study proposed an improved classroom learning behavior recognition algorithm (YOLOv8n_BT) based on YOLOv8n. On the one hand, for the occlusion problem of classroom learning behaviors, this study incorporated the BRA into the Backbone to better capture feature information; on the other hand, for the small object problem of classroom learning behaviors for back-row-students, this study expanded a Tiny Object Detection Layer (TODL) to detect small targets better. Experiments show that the BRA and the TODL can significantly improve the model performance. The YOLOv8n_BT model, which incorporated both the BRA and the TODL into the YOLOv8n(baseline) model simultaneously, has the most significant performance improvement. Compared with the YOLOv8n(baseline), the YOLOv8n_BT model improved by 3.0%, 6.7%, 5.0%, 3.6%, and 9.0% on P, R, F1, mAP50, and mAP50-90, respectively. The detection performance of YOLOv8n_BT also outperforms other state-of-the-arts.

Sonar automatic target recognition (ATR) systems suffer from complex acoustic scattering, background clutter, and waveguide effects that are ever-present in the ocean. Traditional signal processing techniques often struggle to distinguish targets when noise and complicated target geometries are introduced. Recent advancements in machine learning and wavelet theory offer promising directions for extracting informative features from sonar return data. This work introduces a feature extraction and dimensionality reduction technique using the invariant scattering transform and Sparse Multi-view Discriminant Analysis for identifying highly informative features in the PONDEX09/PONDEX10 datasets. The extracted features are used to train a support vector machine classifier that achieves an average classification accuracy of 97.3% using six unique targets.

In order to solve the problems of high leakage rate, high false detection rate, low detection success rate and large model volume of small targets in the traditional target detection algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial images, a lightweight You Only Look Once (YOLO) v8 algorithm model Lightweight (LW)-YOLO v8 is proposed. By increasing the channel attention mechanism Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module, this method can adaptively improves the model's ability to extract features from small targets; at the same time, the lightweight convolution technology is introduced into the Conv module, where the ordinary convolution is replaced by the GSConv module, which can effectively reduce the model computational volume; on the basis of the GSConv module, a single aggregation module VoV-GSCSPC is designed to optimize the model structure in order to achieve a higher computational cost-effectiveness. The experimental results show that the LW-YOLO v8 model's mAP@0.5 metrics on the VisDrone2019 dataset are more favorable than those on the YOLO v8n model, improving by 3.8 percentage points, and the computational amount is reduced to 7.2 GFLOPs. The LW-YOLO v8 model proposed in this work can effectively accomplish the task of detecting small targets in aerial images from UAV at a lower cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pests have caused significant losses to agriculture, greatly increasing the detection of pests in the planting process and the cost of pest management in the early stages. At this time, advances in computer vision and deep learning for the detection of pests appearing in the crop open the door to the application of target detection algorithms that can greatly improve the efficiency of tomato pest detection and play an important technical role in the realization of the intelligent planting of tomatoes. However, in the natural environment, tomato leaf pests are small in size, large in similarity, and large in environmental variability, and this type of situation can lead to greater detection difficulty. Aiming at the above problems, a network target detection model based on deep learning, YOLONDD, is proposed in this paper. Designing a new loss function, NMIoU (Normalized Wasserstein Distance with Mean Pairwise Distance Intersection over Union), which improves the ability of anomaly processing, improves the model’s ability to detect and identify objects of different scales, and improves the robustness to scale changes; Adding a Dynamic head (DyHead) with an attention mechanism will improve the detection ability of targets at different scales, reduce the number of computations and parameters, improve the accuracy of target detection, enhance the overall performance of the model, and accelerate the training process. Adding decoupled head to Head can effectively reduce the number of parameters and computational complexity and enhance the model’s generalization ability and robustness. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of YOLONDD can reach 90.1%, which is 3.33% higher than the original YOLOv5 algorithm and is better than SSD, Faster R-CNN, YOLOv7, YOLOv8, RetinaNet, and other target detection networks, and it can be more efficiently and accurately utilized in tomato leaf pest detection.

Aiming at real-time detection of UAVs, small UAV targets are easily missed and difficult to detect in complex backgrounds. To maintain high detection performance while reducing memory and computational costs, this paper proposes the SEB-YOLOv8s detection method. Firstly, the YOLOv8 network structure is reconstructed using SPD-Conv to reduce the computational burden and accelerate the processing speed while retaining more shallow features of small targets. Secondly, we design the AttC2f module and replace the C2f module in the backbone of YOLOv8s with it, enhancing the model’s ability to obtain accurate information and enriching the extracted relevant information. Finally, Bi-Level Routing Attention is introduced to optimize the Neck part of the network, reducing the model’s attention to interfering information and filtering it out. The experimental results show that the mAP50 of the proposed method reaches 90.5% and the accuracy reaches 95.9%, which are improvements of 2.2% and 1.9%, respectively, compared with the original model. The mAP50-95 is improved by 2.7%, and the model’s occupied memory size only increases by 2.5 MB, effectively achieving high-accuracy real-time detection with low memory consumption.

The vulnerable road users (VRUs), being small and exhibiting random movements, increase the difficulty of object detection of the autonomous emergency braking system for vulnerable road users AEBS-VRUs, with their behaviors highly random. To overcome existing problems of AEBS-VRU object detection, an enhanced YOLOv5 algorithm is proposed. While the Complete Intersection over Union-Loss (CIoU-Loss) and Distance Intersection over Union-Non-Maximum Suppression (DIoU-NMS) are fused to improve the model's convergent speed, the algorithm also incorporates a minor object detection layer to increase the performance of VRU detection. A dataset for complex AEBS-VRUS scenarios is established based on existing datasets such as Caltech, nuScenes, and Penn-Fudan, and the model is trained using migration learning based on the PyTorch framework. A number of comparative experiments using models such as YOLOv6, YOLOv7, YOLOv8 and YOLOx are carried out. The results of the comparative evaluation show that the proposed improved YOLO5 algorithm has the best overall performance in terms of efficiency, accuracy and timeliness of target detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The images captured using UAVs during inspection often contain a great deal of small targets related to transmission lines. These vulnerable elements are critical for ensuring the safe operation of these lines. However, due to various factors such as the small size of the targets, low resolution, complex background, and potential target aggregation, achieving accurate and real-time detection becomes challenging. To address these issues, this paper proposes a detection algorithm called P2-ECA-EIOU-YOLOv5 (P2E-YOLOv5). Firstly, to tackle the challenges posed by the issues of complex background and environmental interference impacting small targets, an ECA attention module is integrated into the network. The module effectively enhances the network's focus on small targets, while concurrently mitigating the influence of environmental interference. Secondly, considering the characteristics of small target size and low resolution, a new high-resolution detection head is introduced, making the network more sensitive to small targets. Lastly, the network utilizes the EIOU_Loss as the regression loss function to improve the positioning accuracy of small targets, especially when they tend to aggregate. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed P2E-YOLOv5 detection algorithm achieves an accuracy P (precision) of 96.0% and an average accuracy (mAP) of 97.0% for small-target detection in transmission lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pedestrian detection relying on deep convolution neural networks has achieved significant progress. However, the performance of current pedestrian detection algorithms remains unsatisfactory when it comes to small targets or heavily occluded pedestrians. In this paper, a new anti-occlusion video pedestrian detection network with multi-level feature fusion named MLFFCSP is proposed for small targets and heavily occluded pedestrians. In the proposed network, the pyramid convolutional neural network PyConvResNet101 is used as backbone to extract features. Then, the shallow and deep features are fused at multiple levels to fully obtain the shallow location information and deep semantic information. In order to improve the robustness of the model, data augmentation is also implemented via random erasing on the training data. Experiments are carried out on Caltech and Citypersons datasets, and the log-average miss rate is used to evaluate the performance of the model. The results show that the performance of MLFFCSP is better than other pedestrian detection algorithms in the case of small targets and serious occlusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Goat identification is highly demanded in modern livestock management, and sheep face detection is an important basis for goat identification, for which we developed a new computer model that overcomes the challenges of unclear images, small targets, and low resolution. By considering the surrounding details and combining different features, our model performs better than existing methods in detecting goat faces. We used various evaluation metrics to measure its effectiveness and found a significant improvement in accuracy. The results confirmed that our method successfully addresses the difficulty of detecting lamb faces. This study has important implications for the development of intelligent management systems for modern livestock farms to better identify and monitor goat for improved animal welfare. With the advancement of deep learning technology, the importance of utilizing deep learning for livestock management is becoming increasingly evident. goat face detection provides a foundation for goat recognition and management. In this study, we proposed a novel neural network specifically designed for goat face object detection, addressing challenges such as low image resolution, small goat face targets, and indistinct features. By incorporating contextual information and feature-fusion complementation, our approach was compared with existing object detection networks using evaluation metrics such as F1-Score (F1), precision (P), recall (R), and average precision (AP). Our results show that there are 8.07%, 0.06, and 6.8% improvements in AP, P, and R, respectively. The findings confirm that the proposed object detection network effectively mitigates the impact of small targets in goat face detection, providing a solid basis for the development of intelligent management systems for modern livestock farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small-target detection suffers from the problems of low average precision and difficulties detecting targets from airport-surface surveillance videos. To address this challenge, this study proposes a small-target detection model based on an attention mechanism. First, a standard airport small-target dataset was established, where the absolute scale of each marked target meets the definition of a small target. Second, using the Mask Scoring R-CNN model as a baseline, an attention module was added to the feature extraction network to enhance its feature representation and improve the accuracy of its small-target detection. A multiscale feature pyramid fusion module was used to fuse more detailed shallow information according to the feature differences of diverse small targets. Finally, a more effective detection branch structure is proposed to improve detection accuracy. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting small targets. Compared to the Mask R-CNN and Mask Scoring R-CNN models, the detection accuracy of the proposed method in two-pixel intervals with the lowest rate of small targets increased by 10%, 3.04% and 16%, 15.15%, respectively. The proposed method proved to have a higher accuracy and be more effective at small-target detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The escalating global climate change significantly impacts the yield and quality of maize, a vital staple crop worldwide, especially during seedling stage droughts. Traditional detection methods are limited by their single-scenario approach, requiring substantial human labor and time, and lack accuracy in the real-time monitoring and precise assessment of drought severity. In this study, a novel early drought detection method for maize based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images and Yolov8+ is proposed. In the Backbone section, the C2F-Conv module is adopted to reduce model parameters and deployment costs, while incorporating the CA attention mechanism module to effectively capture tiny feature information in the images. The Neck section utilizes the BiFPN fusion architecture and spatial attention mechanism to enhance the model’s ability to recognize small and occluded targets. The Head section introduces an additional 10 × 10 output, integrates loss functions, and enhances accuracy by 1.46%, reduces training time by 30.2%, and improves robustness. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved Yolov8+ model achieves precision and recall rates of approximately 90.6% and 88.7%, respectively. The mAP@50 and mAP@50:95 reach 89.16% and 71.14%, respectively, representing respective increases of 3.9% and 3.3% compared to the original Yolov8. The UAV image detection speed of the model is up to 24.63 ms, with a model size of 13.76 MB, optimized by 31.6% and 28.8% compared to the original model, respectively. In comparison with the Yolov8, Yolov7, and Yolo5s models, the proposed method exhibits varying degrees of superiority in mAP@50, mAP@50:95, and other metrics, utilizing drone imagery and deep learning techniques to truly propel agricultural modernization.

To address the current problems of the incomplete classification of mask-wearing detection data, small-target miss detection, and the insufficient feature extraction capabilities of lightweight networks dealing with complex faces, a lightweight method with an attention mechanism for detecting mask wearing is presented in this paper. This study incorporated an "incorrect_mask" category into the dataset to address incomplete classification. Additionally, the YOLOv4-tiny model was enhanced with a prediction feature layer and feature fusion execution, expanding the detection scale range and improving the performance on small targets. A CBAM attention module was then introduced into the feature enhancement network, which re-screened the feature information of the region of interest to retain important feature information and improve the feature extraction capabilities. Finally, a focal loss function and an improved mosaic data enhancement strategy were used to enhance the target classification performance. The experimental results of classifying three objects demonstrate that the lightweight model's detection speed was not compromised while achieving a 2.08% increase in the average classification precision, which was only 0.69% lower than that of the YOLOv4 network. Therefore, this approach effectively improves the detection effect of the lightweight network for mask-wearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to solve the problems of high leakage rate, high false detection rate, low detection success rate and large model volume of small targets in the traditional target detection algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial images, a lightweight You Only Look Once (YOLO) v8 algorithm model Lightweight (LW)-YOLO v8 is proposed. By increasing the channel attention mechanism Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module, this method can adaptively improves the model’s ability to extract features from small targets; at the same time, the lightweight convolution technology is introduced into the Conv module, where the ordinary convolution is replaced by the GSConv module, which can effectively reduce the model computational volume; on the basis of the GSConv module, a single aggregation module VoV-GSCSPC is designed to optimize the model structure in order to achieve a higher computational cost-effectiveness. The experimental results show that the LW-YOLO v8 model’s mAP@0.5 metrics on the VisDrone2019 dataset are more favorable than those on the YOLO v8n model, improving by 3.8 percentage points, and the computational amount is reduced to 7.2 GFLOPs. The LW-YOLO v8 model proposed in this work can effectively accomplish the task of detecting small targets in aerial images from UAV at a lower cost.

Summary: As the development of deep learning and the continuous improvement of computing power, as well as the needs of social production, target detection has become a research hotspot in recent years. However, target detection algorithm has the problem that it is more sensitive to large targets and does not consider the feature‐feature interrelationship, which leads to a high false detection or missed detection rate of small targets. An small target detection method (C‐SSD) based on improved SSD is proposed, that replaces the backbone network VGG‐16 of the SSD network with the improved dense convolution network (C‐DenseNet) network to achieves further feature fusion through fast connections between dense blocks. The Introduction of residuals in the prediction layer and DIoU‐NMS further improves the detection accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that C‐SSD outperforms other networks at three different image scales and achieves the best performance of 83. A 8% accuracy on the PASCAL VOC2007 test set, proving the effectiveness of the algorithm. C‐SSD achieves a better balance of speed and accuracy, showing excellent performance in rapid detection of small targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Computer Engineering & Applications is the property of Beijing Journal of Computer Engineering & Applications Journal Co Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Due to the irresistible factors of material properties and processing technology in the steel production, there may be different types of defects on the steel surface, such as rolling scale, patches and so on, which seriously affect the quality of steel, and thus have a negative impact on the economic efficiency of the enterprises. Different from the general target detection tasks, the defect detection tasks have small targets and extreme aspect ratio targets. The contradiction of high positioning accuracy for targets and their inconspicuous features makes the defect detection tasks difficult. Therefore, the original YOLOv5 algorithm was improved in this paper to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of detecting defects on steel surfaces. Firstly, an attention mechanism module was added in the process of transmitting the shallow feature map from the backbone structure to the neck structure, aiming at improving the algorithm attention to small targets information in the feature map and suppressing the influence of irrelevant information on the algorithm, so as to improve the detection accuracy of the algorithm for small targets. Secondly, in order to improve the algorithm effectiveness in detecting extreme aspect ratio targets, K-means algorithm was used to cluster and analyze the marked steel surface defect dataset, so that the anchor boxes can be adapted to all types of sizes, especially for extreme aspect ratio defects. The experimental results showed that the improved algorithms were better than the original YOLOv5 algorithm in terms of the average precision and the mean average precision. The mean average precision, demonstrating the largest increase among the improved YOLOv5 algorithms, was increased by 4.57% in the YOLOv5+CBAM algorithm. In particular, the YOLOv5+CBAM algorithm had a significant increase in the average precision for small targets and extreme aspect ratio targets. Therefore, the YOLOv5+CBAM algorithm could make the accurate localization and classification of steel surface defects, which can provide a reference for the automatic detection of steel defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The oil spill is a significant source of marine pollution, causing severe harm to marine ecosystems. Detecting oil spills accurately using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is crucial for protecting the environment. However, oil spill targets in SAR images are small and resemble other objects "look-alike". Traditional semantic segmentation networks for MOSD may lose critical information during downsampling Hence, we propose a shape-aware and adaptive strip self-attention guided progressive network (SAGPNet) for MOSD. Firstly, we adopted the progressive strategy to reduce detailed information loss. Second, we improved the traditional U-Net by redesigning its encoder unit. Specifically, we proposed a shape-aware and multi-scale feature extraction module and an adaptive strip self-attention module (ASSAM). These modifications allow the model to extract shape, multi-scale, and global information during the encoding process, addressing the challenges posed by small targets and "look-alike". Third, we utilize the ASSAM to extract global features from the final encoding layer of the earlier stage of the progressive network to guide the encoding features of the subsequent stage, aiming to recognize the overall shape of the oil spill and ensure that the model preserves crucial contextual information, further mitigate the information loss caused by downsampling. Finally, we designed a joint loss to address pixel imbalance between oil spills and other targets. We use three public oil spill detection datasets to evaluate the performance of SAGPNet. The experimental results show superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the effectiveness of SAGPNet in addressing the challenges associated with MOSD., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The vulnerable road users (VRUs), being small and exhibiting random movements, increase the difficulty of object detection of the autonomous emergency braking system for vulnerable road users AEBS-VRUs, with their behaviors highly random. To overcome existing problems of AEBS-VRU object detection, an enhanced YOLOv5 algorithm is proposed. While the Complete Intersection over Union-Loss (CIoU-Loss) and Distance Intersection over Union-Non-Maximum Suppression (DIoU-NMS) are fused to improve the model’s convergent speed, the algorithm also incorporates a minor object detection layer to increase the performance of VRU detection. A dataset for complex AEBS-VRUS scenarios is established based on existing datasets such as Caltech, nuScenes, and Penn-Fudan, and the model is trained using migration learning based on the PyTorch framework. A number of comparative experiments using models such as YOLOv6, YOLOv7, YOLOv8 and YOLOx are carried out. The results of the comparative evaluation show that the proposed improved YOLO5 algorithm has the best overall performance in terms of efficiency, accuracy and timeliness of target detection.

The images captured using UAVs during inspection often contain a great deal of small targets related to transmission lines. These vulnerable elements are critical for ensuring the safe operation of these lines. However, due to various factors such as the small size of the targets, low resolution, complex background, and potential target aggregation, achieving accurate and real-time detection becomes challenging. To address these issues, this paper proposes a detection algorithm called P2-ECA-EIOU-YOLOv5 (P2E-YOLOv5). Firstly, to tackle the challenges posed by the issues of complex background and environmental interference impacting small targets, an ECA attention module is integrated into the network. The module effectively enhances the network’s focus on small targets, while concurrently mitigating the influence of environmental interference. Secondly, considering the characteristics of small target size and low resolution, a new high-resolution detection head is introduced, making the network more sensitive to small targets. Lastly, the network utilizes the EIOU_Loss as the regression loss function to improve the positioning accuracy of small targets, especially when they tend to aggregate. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed P2E-YOLOv5 detection algorithm achieves an accuracy P (precision) of 96.0% and an average accuracy (mAP) of 97.0% for small-target detection in transmission lines.

Remote sensing super-resolution (RSSR) aims to improve remote sensing (RS) image resolution while providing finer spatial details, which is of great significance for high-quality RS image interpretation. The traditional RSSR is based on the optimization method, which pays insufficient attention to small targets and lacks the ability of model understanding and detail supplement. To alleviate the above problems, we propose the generative Diffusion Model with Detail Complement (DMDC) for RS super-resolution. Firstly, unlike traditional optimization models with insufficient image understanding, we introduce the diffusion model as a generation model into RSSR tasks and regard low-resolution images as condition information to guide image generation. Next, considering that generative models may not be able to accurately recover specific small objects and complex scenes, we propose the detail supplement task to improve the recovery ability of DMDC. Finally, the strong diversity of the diffusion model makes it possibly inappropriate in RSSR, for this purpose, we come up with joint pixel constraint loss and denoise loss to optimize the direction of inverse diffusion. The extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in RSSR with small and dense targets. Moreover, the results from direct transfer to different datasets also prove the superior generalization ability of DMDC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Computer Engineering & Applications is the property of Beijing Journal of Computer Engineering & Applications Journal Co Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Fish are indicative species with a relatively balanced ecosystem. Underwater target fish detection is of great significance to fishery resource investigations. Traditional investigation methods cannot meet the increasing requirements of environmental protection and investigation, and the existing target detection technology has few studies on the dynamic identification of underwater fish and small targets. To reduce environmental disturbances and solve the problems of many fish, dense, mutual occlusion and difficult detection of small targets, an improved CME-YOLOv5 network is proposed to detect fish in dense groups and small targets. First, the coordinate attention (CA) mechanism and cross-stage partial networks with 3 convolutions (C3) structure are fused into the C3CA module to replace the C3 module of the backbone in you only look once (YOLOv5) to improve the extraction of target feature information and detection accuracy. Second, the three detection layers are expanded to four, which enhances the model's ability to capture information in different dimensions and improves detection performance. Finally, the efficient intersection over union (EIOU) loss function is used instead of the generalized intersection over union (GIOU) loss function to optimize the convergence rate and location accuracy. Based on the actual image data and a small number of datasets obtained online, the experimental results showed that the mean average precision (mAP@0.50) of the proposed algorithm reached 94.9%, which is 4.4 percentage points higher than that of the YOLOv5 algorithm, and the number of fish and small target detection performances was 24.6% higher. The results show that our proposed algorithm exhibits good detection performance when applied to densely spaced fish and small targets and can be used as an alternative or supplemental method for fishery resource investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement of deep learning technology, the importance of utilizing deep learning for livestock management is becoming increasingly evident. goat face detection provides a foundation for goat recognition and management. In this study, we proposed a novel neural network specifically designed for goat face object detection, addressing challenges such as low image resolution, small goat face targets, and indistinct features. By incorporating contextual information and feature-fusion complementation, our approach was compared with existing object detection networks using evaluation metrics such as F1-Score (F1), precision (P), recall (R), and average precision (AP). Our results show that there are 8.07%, 0.06, and 6.8% improvements in AP, P, and R, respectively. The findings confirm that the proposed object detection network effectively mitigates the impact of small targets in goat face detection, providing a solid basis for the development of intelligent management systems for modern livestock farms.

In this research, an infrared small target detection method called single-window average absolute gray difference algorithm (SW-AAGD) is proposed. This algorithm is derived from the average absolute difference algorithm which is highly capable of enhancing targets and suppressing the background clutters in infrared images. A common challenge in the average absolute gray difference algorithm is the choice of proper target and background windows due to the blurred edges of the small target. In the proposed algorithm, a single window is used for the target and background windows. To address this issue, a degree of membership is defined for each existing pixel of these windows. The membership degrees of pixels in the main window are in accordance with the properties of real targets in infrared images. These values are estimated in a way that there is no need for determining the exact target and background areas. To estimate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, the algorithm is applied on several real images that contain real targets and the results are compared to five well-known methods in terms of the signal to clutter ratio (SCR), background suppression factor (BSF) and receiving operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The results prove the effectiveness of the membership degree assignment on the overall performance of detection algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small-target detection suffers from the problems of low average precision and difficulties detecting targets from airport-surface surveillance videos. To address this challenge, this study proposes a small-target detection model based on an attention mechanism. First, a standard airport small-target dataset was established, where the absolute scale of each marked target meets the definition of a small target. Second, using the Mask Scoring R-CNN model as a baseline, an attention module was added to the feature extraction network to enhance its feature representation and improve the accuracy of its small-target detection. A multiscale feature pyramid fusion module was used to fuse more detailed shallow information according to the feature differences of diverse small targets. Finally, a more effective detection branch structure is proposed to improve detection accuracy. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting small targets. Compared to the Mask R-CNN and Mask Scoring R-CNN models, the detection accuracy of the proposed method in two-pixel intervals with the lowest rate of small targets increased by 10%, 3.04% and 16%, 15.15%, respectively. The proposed method proved to have a higher accuracy and be more effective at small-target detection.

Objective. While brain-computer interface (BCI) based on rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) is widely used in target detection, patterns of event-related potential (ERP), as well as the performance on detecting inconspicuous targets remain unknown. Moreover, participant-screening methods to excluded 'BCI-blind' users are still lacking. Approach. A RSVP paradigm was designed with targets of varied concealment, size, and location. ERPs (e.g. P300 and N2pc) and target detection accuracy were compared among these conditions. The relationship between participants' attention scores and target detection accuracy was also analyzed to test attention level as a criterion for participant screening. Main results. Statistical analysis showed that the conditions of target concealment and size significantly influenced ERP. In particular, ERP for inconspicuous targets, such as concealed and small targets, exhibited lower amplitudes and longer latencies. In consistent, the accuracy of detection in inconspicuous condition was significantly lower than that of conspicuous condition. In addition, a significant association was found between attention scores and target detection accuracy for camouflaged targets. Significance. The study was the first to address ERP features among multiple dimensions of concealment, size, and location. The conclusion provided insights into the relationship between ERP decoding and properties of targets. In addition, the association between attention scores and detection accuracy implied a promising method in screening well-behaved participants for camouflaged target detection., (© 2024 IOP Publishing Ltd.)

Remote sensing super-resolution (RSSR) aims to improve remote sensing (RS) image resolution while providing finer spatial details, which is of great significance for high-quality RS image interpretation. The traditional RSSR is based on the optimization method, which pays insufficient attention to small targets and lacks the ability of model understanding and detail supplement. To alleviate the above problems, we propose the generative Diffusion Model with Detail Complement (DMDC) for RS super-resolution. Firstly, unlike traditional optimization models with insufficient image understanding, we introduce the diffusion model as a generation model into RSSR tasks and regard low-resolution images as condition information to guide image generation. Next, considering that generative models may not be able to accurately recover specific small objects and complex scenes, we propose the detail supplement task to improve the recovery ability of DMDC. Finally, the strong diversity of the diffusion model makes it possibly inappropriate in RSSR, for this purpose, we come up with joint pixel constraint loss and denoise loss to optimize the direction of inverse diffusion. The extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in RSSR with small and dense targets. Moreover, the results from direct transfer to different datasets also prove the superior generalization ability of DMDC.

The disease spots on the grape leaves can be detected by using the image processing and deep learning methods. However, the accuracy and efficiency of the detection are still the challenges. The convolutional substrate information is fuzzy, and the detection results are not satisfactory if the disease spot is relatively small. In particular, the detection will be difficult if the number of pixels of the spot is

The disease spots on the grape leaves can be detected by using the image processing and deep learning methods. However, the accuracy and efficiency of the detection are still the challenges. The convolutional substrate information is fuzzy, and the detection results are not satisfactory if the disease spot is relatively small. In particular, the detection will be difficult if the number of pixels of the spot is <32 × 32 in the image. In order to effectively address this problem, we present a super-resolution image enhancement and convolutional neural network-based algorithm for the detection of black rot on grape leaves. First, the original image is up-sampled and enhanced with local details using the bilinear interpolation. As a result, the number of pixels in the image increase. Then, the enhanced images are fed into the proposed YOLOv3-SPP network for detection. In the proposed network, the IOU (Intersection Over Union, IOU) in the original YOLOv3 network is replaced with GIOU (Generalized Intersection Over Union, GIOU). In addition, we also add the SPP (Spatial Pyramid Pooling, SPP) module to improve the detection performance of the network. Finally, the official pre-trained weights of YOLOv3 are used for fast convergence. The test set test_pv from the Plant Village and the test set test_orchard from the orchard field were used to evaluate the network performance. The results of test_pv show that the grape leaf black rot is detected by the YOLOv3-SPP with 95.79% detection accuracy and 94.52% detector recall, which is a 5.94% greater in terms of accuracy and 10.67% greater in terms of recall as compared to the original YOLOv3. The results of test_orchard show that the method proposed in this paper can be applied in field environment with 86.69% detection precision and 82.27% detector recall, and the accuracy and recall were improved to 94.05 and 93.26% if the images with the simple background. Therefore, the detection method proposed in this work effectively solves the detection task of small targets and improves the detection effectiveness of the grape leaf black rot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Computer Engineering & Applications is the property of Beijing Journal of Computer Engineering & Applications Journal Co Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)