Small Object Detection Algorithm Based on SSG-YOLO
(1.Taizhou Power Supply Branch, State Grid Jiangsu Electric Power Co., Ltd., Taizhou 225300, China; 2.Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University, Huzhou 313001, China)
Abstract
To address the accuracy degradation of YOLOv11 in Small Object Detection, this research proposes an improved detection algorithm named SSG-YOLO. Based on YOLOv11n, the algorithm designs a new multi-scale, high-resolution detection head structure to enhance the perception capability for small objects, introduces the parameter-free attention mechanism SimAM to strengthen the model's spatial response ability, and introduces the SIoU loss function to optimize bounding box regression. Experiments conducted on the VisDrone dataset demonstrate that the model achieves improved Small Object Detection accuracy while maintaining a lightweight architecture. However, the SIoU loss function performs poorly in this task, leading to an overall degradation in model performance, indicating its negative impact on small object localization. The final model achieves a good balance between accuracy and speed. Furthermore, training and validation on a self-constructed dataset (DW) show that the improved model increases mAP50 by 1.7% on the VisDrone dataset while retaining its lightweight characteristics, making it suitable for Small Object Detection and target recognition scenarios such as electrical materials.
Keywords
SSG-YOLO; YOLOv11; detection head; SimAM; Small Object Detection; electrical material recognition
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Funding
Key R&D Program Project High end Equipment Special Project (2025ZD201)
About the authors
Chang Hong (1979-), male, Han ethnicity, born in Taizhou, Jiangsu, is a senior economist with a bachelor's degree. His research interests include green supply chain, smart warehousing, and image processing; Ni Huahao (1975-), male, Han ethnicity, from Qidong, Jiangsu, senior engineer, bachelor's degree, research direction: green supply chain, data analysis; Li Heshuang (1990-), female, Han ethnicity, born in Jingjiang, Jiangsu, is a senior engineer with a bachelor's degree. Her research interests include green supply chain and smart warehousing; Cai Zhenyu (1994-), male, Han nationality, from Zhuzhou, Hunan, assistant researcher, master's degree, research direction: deep learning, image processing.