White blood cell (WBC) classification plays a crucial role in hematopathology and clinical diagnostics. However, traditional methods are constrained by limited receptive fields and insufficient utilization of contextual information, which hinders classification performance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an enhanced WBC classification algorithm, CCE-YOLOv7, which is built upon the YOLOv7 framework. The proposed method introduces four key innovations to enhance detection accuracy and model efficiency: (1) A novel Conv2Former (Convolutional Transformer) backbone was designed to combine the local pattern extraction capability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the global contextual reasoning of transformers, thereby improving the expressiveness of feature representation. (2) The CARAFE (Content-Aware ReAssembly of Features) upsampling operator was adopted to replace conventional interpolation methods, thereby enhancing the spatial resolution and semantic richness of feature maps. (3) An Efficient Multi-scale Attention (EMA) module was introduced to refine multi-scale feature fusion, enabling the model to better focus on spatially relevant features critical for WBC classification. (4) Soft-NMS (Soft Non-Maximum Suppression) was used instead of traditional NMS to better preserve true positives in densely packed or overlapping cell scenarios, thereby reducing false positives and false negatives. Experimental validation was conducted on a WBC image dataset acquired using the Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) system. The proposed CCE-YOLOv7 achieved a detection accuracy of 89.3%, showing a 7.8% improvement over the baseline YOLOv7. Furthermore, CCE-YOLOv7 reduced the number of parameters by 2 million and lowered computational complexity by 5.7 GFLOPs, offering an efficient and lightweight model suitable for real-time clinical applications. To further evaluate model effectiveness, comparative experiments were conducted with YOLOv8 and YOLOv11. CCE-YOLOv7 achieved a 4.1% higher detection accuracy than YOLOv8 while reducing computational cost by 2.4 GFLOPs. Compared with the more advanced YOLOv11, CCE-YOLOv7 maintained competitive accuracy (only 0.6% lower) while using significantly fewer parameters and 4.3 GFLOPs less in computation, highlighting its superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. These results demonstrate that CCE-YOLOv7 provides a robust, accurate, and computationally efficient solution for automated WBC classification, with significant clinical applicability.

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.

Autonomous Fourier Ptychographic Microscopy (FPM) is a technology widely used in the field of pathology. It is compatible with high resolution and large field-of-view imaging and can observe more image details. Red blood cells play an indispensable role in assessing the oxygen-carrying capacity of the human body and in screening for clinical diagnosis and treatment needs. In this paper, the blood cell data set is constructed based on the FPM system experimental platform. Before training, four enhancement strategies are adopted for the blood cell image data to improve the generalization and robustness of the model. A blood cell detection algorithm based on SCD-YOLOv7 is proposed. Firstly, the C-MP (Convolutional Max Pooling) module and DELAN (Deep Efficient Learning Automotive Network) module are used in the feature extraction network to optimize the feature extraction process and improve the extraction ability of overlapping cell features by considering the characteristics of channels and spatial dimensions. Secondly, through the Sim-Head detection head, the global information of the deep feature map (mean average precision) and the local details of the shallow feature map are fully utilized to improve the performance of the algorithm for small target detection. MAP is a comprehensive indicator for evaluating the performance of object detection algorithms, which measures the accuracy and robustness of a model by calculating the average precision (AP) under different categories or thresholds. Finally, the Focal-EIoU (Focal Extended Intersection over Union) loss function is introduced, which not only improves the convergence speed of the model but also significantly improves the accuracy of blood cell detection. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of ablation experiments and comparative experimental results, the detection accuracy of the SCD-YOLOv7 algorithm on the blood cell data set reached 92.4%, increased by 7.2%, and the calculation amount was reduced by 14.6 G.

As autonomous-driving scenarios become increasingly complex, object detection in road environments remains challenging, especially for small-scale, visually ambiguous, and partially occluded targets. These difficulties are closely related to the loss of fine-grained spatial information caused by repeated downsampling and the limited consistency of multi-scale feature fusion. To address these issues, this paper proposes MFP-YOLOv11 (Multi-dimensional Focused P2 YOLOv11), a YOLOv11-based detector with enhanced multi-scale feature fusion for complex road-scene object detection. The proposed method improves the YOLOv11 architecture from the perspectives of high-resolution feature preservation, deep contextual representation, and multi-scale feature fusion consistency. Specifically, a Multi-Scale Dynamic Alignment Feature Fusion module (MDAF) is designed as the main fusion component to enhance multi-scale feature representation by modelling channel-, spatial-, and scale-level relationships among features at different resolutions. In addition, C3Ghost is selectively employed in shallow high-resolution stages to partially offset the additional computational cost introduced by the enhanced architecture, AIFI-RepBN is introduced to strengthen deep contextual representation, and Detect-P2 is added to provide high-resolution prediction compensation for small-scale object detection. Experimental results on the SODA10M dataset show that MFP-YOLOv11 achieves an mAP@0.5 of 0.697 and an mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.483, corresponding to absolute gains of 7.0 and 5.7 percentage points over the YOLOv11 baseline, respectively. Comparative experiments, ablation studies, component-wise analysis, and qualitative visualizations show the contribution of the proposed modifications to detection performance in representative complex road scenes. Cross-dataset testing on the KITTI dataset further evaluates the performance of the proposed method under heterogeneous road-scene distributions. Overall, MFP-YOLOv11 improves Recall and mAP in complex road-scene object detection, while introducing higher computational complexity than the original baseline model.