This study introduces an advanced algorithm for intelligent vehicle target detection in hazy conditions, aiming to bolster the environmental perception capabilities of autonomous vehicles. The proposed approach integrates a hybrid convolutional module (HDC) into an all-in-one dehazing network, AOD-Net, to expand the perceptual domain for image feature extraction and refine the clarity of dehazed images. To accelerate model convergence and enhance generalization, the loss function has been optimized. For practical deployment in intelligent vehicle systems, the ShuffleNetv2 lightweight network module is incorporated into the YOLOv5s network backbone, and the feature pyramid network (FPN) within the neck network has been refined. Additionally, the network employs a global shuffle convolution (GSconv) to balance accuracy with parameter count. To further focus on the target, a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) is introduced, which helps in reducing the network’s parameter count without compromising accuracy. A comparative experiment was conducted, and the results indicated that our algorithm achieved an impressive mean average precision (mAP) of 76.8% at an intersection-over-union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 in hazy conditions, outperforming YOLOv5 by 7.4 percentage points.

To address the issues of false detections and missed detections in object detection for intelligent driving scenarios, this study focuses on optimizing the YOLOv10 algorithm to reduce model complexity while enhancing detection accuracy. The method involves three key improvements. First, it involves the design of multi-scale flexible convolution (MSFC), which can capture multi-scale information simultaneously, thereby reducing network stacking and computational load. Second, it reconstructs the neck network structure by incorporating Shallow Auxiliary Fusion (SAF) and Advanced Auxiliary Fusion (AAF), enabling better capture of multi-scale features of objects. Third, it improves the detection head through the combination of multi-scale convolution and channel adaptive attention mechanism, enhancing the diversity and accuracy of feature extraction. Results show that the improved YOLOv10 model has a size of 13.4 MB, meaning a reduction of 11.8%, and that the detection accuracy mAP@0.5 reaches 93.0%, outperforming mainstream models in comprehensive performance. This work provides a detection framework for intelligent driving scenarios, balancing accuracy and model size.