Small-Target Detection Algorithm Based on STDA-YOLOv8

Due to the inherent limitations of detection networks and the imbalance in training data, small-target detection has always been a challenging issue in the field of target detection. To address the issues of false positives and missed detections in small-target detection scenarios, a new algorithm based on STDA-YOLOv8 is proposed for small-target detection. A novel network architecture for small-target detection is designed, incorporating a Contextual Augmentation Module (CAM) and a Feature Refinement Module (FRM) to enhance the detection performance for small targets. The CAM introduces multi-scale dilated convolutions, where convolutional kernels with different dilation rates capture contextual information from various receptive fields, enabling more accurate extraction of small-target features. The FRM performs adaptive feature fusion in both channel and spatial dimensions, significantly improving the detection precision for small targets. Addressing the issue of a significant disparity in the number of annotations between small and larger objects in existing classic public datasets, a new data augmentation method called Copy–Reduce–Paste is introduced. Ablation and comparative experiments conducted on the proposed STDA-YOLOv8 model demonstrate that on the VisDrone dataset, its accuracy improved by 5.3% compared to YOLOv8, reaching 93.5%; on the PASCAL VOC dataset, its accuracy increased by 5.7% compared to YOLOv8, achieving 94.2%, outperforming current mainstream target detection models and small-target detection algorithms like QueryDet, effectively enhancing small-target detection capabilities.