Autonomous vehicles operating in public transportation spaces must rapidly and accurately detect all potential hazards in their surroundings to execute appropriate actions such as yielding, lane changing, and overtaking. This capability is a prerequisite for achieving advanced autonomous driving. In autonomous driving scenarios, distant objects are often small, which increases the risk of detection failures. To address this challenge, the MST-YOLOv8 model, which incorporates the C2f-MLCA structure and the ST-P2Neck structure to enhance the model’s ability to detect small objects, is proposed. This paper introduces mixed local channel attention (MLCA) into the C2f structure, enabling the model to pay more attention to the region of small objects. A P2 detection layer is added to the neck part of the YOLOv8 model, and scale sequence feature fusion (SSFF) and triple feature encoding (TFE) modules are introduced to assist the model in better localizing small objects. Compared with the original YOLOv8 model, MST-YOLOv8 demonstrates a 3.43% improvement in precision (P), an 8.15% improvement in recall (R), an 8.42% increase in mAP_0.5, a reduction in missed detection rate by 18.47%, a 70.97% improvement in small object detection AP, and a 68.92% improvement in AR.

Due to the limited memory and computing resources in the real application of target detection, the method is challenging to implement on mobile and embedded devices. In order to achieve the balance between detection accuracy and speed in pedestrian-intensive scenes, an improved lightweight dense pedestrian detection algorithm GS-YOLOv5 (GhostNet GSConv- SIoU) is proposed in this paper. In the Backbone section, GhostNet is used to replace the original CSPDarknet53 network structure, reducing the number of parameters and computation. The CBL module is replaced with GSConv in the Head section, and the CSP module is replaced with VoV-GSCSP. The SloU loss function is used to replace the original IoU loss function to improve the prediction box overlap problem in dense scenes. The model parameters are reduced by 40% and the calculation amount is reduced by 64% without losing the average accuracy, and the detection accuracy is improved by 0.5%. The experimental results show that the GS-YOLOv5 can detect pedestrians more effectively under limited hardware conditions to cope with dense pedestrian scenes, and it is suitable for the online real-time detection of pedestrians.

The combination of a blood cell analyzer and artificial microscopy to detect white blood cells is used in hospitals. Blood cell analyzers not only have large throughput, but they also cannot detect cell morphology; although artificial microscopy has high accuracy, it is inefficient and prone to missed detections. In view of the above problems, a method based on Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) and deep learning to detect peripheral blood leukocytes is proposed in this paper. Firstly, high-resolution and wide-field microscopic images of human peripheral blood cells are obtained using the FPM system, and the cell image data are enhanced with DCGANs (deep convolution generative adversarial networks) to construct datasets for performance evaluation. Then, an improved DETR (detection transformer) algorithm is proposed to improve the detection accuracy of small white blood cell targets; that is, the residual module Conv Block in the feature extraction part of the DETR network is improved to reduce the problem of information loss caused by downsampling. Finally, CIOU (complete intersection over union) is introduced as the bounding box loss function, which avoids the problem that GIOU (generalized intersection over union) is difficult to optimize when the two boxes are far away and the convergence speed is faster. The experimental results show that the mAP of the improved DETR algorithm in the detection of human peripheral white blood cells is 0.936. In addition, this algorithm is compared with other convolutional neural networks in terms of average accuracy, parameters, and number of inference frames per second, which verifies the feasibility of this method in microscopic medical image detection.

Object detection plays a pivotal role in safety-critical applications, including autonomous driving, intelligent surveillance, and unmanned aerial systems. However, many state-of-the-art detectors remain highly resource-intensive; their large parameter sizes and substantial floating-point operations make it difficult to balance accuracy and efficiency, particularly under constrained computational budgets. To mitigate this accuracy–efficiency trade-off, we propose FE-YOLOv8, a lightweight yet more effective variant of YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once version 8). Specifically, two architectural refinements are introduced: (1) C2f-Faster (Cross-Stage-Partial 2-Conv Faster Block) modules embedded in both the backbone and neck, where PConv (partial convolution) prunes redundant computations without diminishing representational capacity; and (2) an EfficientHead detection head that integrates EMSConv (Efficient Multi-Scale Convolution) to enhance multi-scale feature fusion while simplifying the head design and maintaining low computational complexity. Extensive ablation and comparative experiments on the SODA-10M dataset show that FE-YOLOv8 reduces the parameter count by 31.09% and the computational cost by 43.31% relative to baseline YOLOv8 while achieving comparable or superior mean Average Precision (mAP). Generalization experiments conducted on the BDD100K dataset further validate these improvements, demonstrating that FE-YOLOv8 achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency within the YOLOv8 family and provides new architectural insights for lightweight object detector design.