Organizations: School of Energy and Electrical Engineering, Chang’an University, Xi’an, China · School of Information Engineering, Chang’an University, Xi’an, China
Accurate vehicle detection is a critical component of autonomous driving, traffic surveillance, and intelligent transportation systems. This paper presents an enhanced YOLOv8n-based model that integrates the Ghost Module, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and Deformable Convolutional Networks v2 (DCNv2) to improve detection performance. The Ghost Module reduces feature redundancy through efficient feature generation, CBAM refines feature representation via channel and spatial attention, and DCNv2 enhances adaptability to geometric variations in vehicle structures. Evaluated on the KITTI dataset, the proposed model achieves 95.4% mAP@0.5, representing an 8.97% improvement over the baseline YOLOv8n, along with 96.2% precision, 93.7% recall, and a 94.93% F1-score. Comparative analysis against seven state-of-the-art detectors demonstrates consistent superiority across key performance metrics, while ablation studies validate the individual and combined contributions of the integrated modules. By addressing feature redundancy, attention refinement, and spatial adaptability, the proposed approach offers a robust and computationally efficient solution for vehicle detection in diverse and complex traffic environments.
In modern vehicular systems, robust performance under harsh conditions has become a critical problem of autonomous driving. Our study delivers a comprehensive evaluation of the newest iteration of the YOLO series, which is YOLOv11 Nano architecture benchmarked against the widely adopted YOLOv8 Nano as a baseline on a custom fused dataset that combines the Indian Driving Dataset (IDD) [1] and Berkeley Deep Drive Dataset (BDD100K) [2]. We have analyzed the trade-offs among detection accuracy, inference speed, and computational efficiency in high-entropy scenarios involving dense mixed traffic, rain, and low-light conditions. Specifically, YOLOv11n achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP@50) of 46.6%, with a notable 3.2% improvement in Precision over the baseline, effectively reducing false positives in cluttered scenes. Furthermore, the proposed model exhibits enhanced energy efficiency, requiring 22% fewer FLOPs (6.3G vs. 8.1G) while maintaining real-time inference speed of 70.9 FPS on a Tesla T4 GPU, offering an optimal trade-off for safety-critical edge deployment.
Quoc Thuan Nguyen, Ha Anh Vu, Ngo Dang Thanh Ngan +1
Traffic sign detection is a fundamental component of environmental perception in autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems. However, most existing detectors rely on static inference with globally shared parameters, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse and unstructured traffic scenarios. As a result, a single static model often struggles to simultaneously handle both clear near-range samples and challenging conditions such as distant small targets or adverse weather environments. To address this limitation, we propose CBDES MoE TSR, a hierarchically decoupled heterogeneous mixture-of-experts(MoE) framework for traffic sign recognition. The proposed framework departs from the conventional globally shared parameter paradigm by introducing a heterogeneous You Only Look Once (YOLO) expert pool together with a lightweight gating network, enabling an image-level dynamic routing mechanism. Based on the semantic characteristics of the input image, the gating module selectively activates the most suitable expert model from the expert pool, enabling a shift from fixed parameter fitting to on-demand dynamic representation. This design enhances feature extraction capability for specific scenarios while maintaining controlled inference overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a remarkable balance between detection accuracy and efficiency on the composite traffic sign dataset. Specifically, our method attains an mAP50-95 of 76.8%, yielding a 2.3% improvement over the baseline method (74.5%) while simultaneously reducing computational overhead by approximately 39.4%. These findings robustly validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Object detection in real-world scenarios remains challenging due to diverse image degradations and heterogeneous object distributions, which significantly hinder the generalization of existing detectors. Conventional approaches, including scene-specific representation learning and end-to-end pipeline design, are inherently limited by their reliance on predefined conditions and lack adaptability to dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose DetAS, an agentic detection framework that formulates object detection as a dynamic decision process. Instead of relying on static pipelines, DetAS leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a central agent to adaptively compose detection workflows by selecting from a toolbox of restoration modules and specialized detectors. Specifically, DetAS consists of two key components: Self-Adaptive Image Restoration, which dynamically determines whether and how to enhance images for downstream detection, and Multi-Expertise Detection, which integrates multiple domain-specialized detectors and resolves their predictions through instance-level reasoning. To further improve decision quality under fine-grained conditions, we introduce Self-Evolving Experience Harvesting and extend the framework to DetAS-X, which accumulates node-level decision experience from a small set of annotated data and enables experience-aware reasoning during inference. This mechanism allows the system to progressively refine its decision policy and adapt to diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on six challenging benchmarks demonstrate that DetAS-X significantly outperforms existing MLLM-based detectors, achieving an average improvement of 28.36% in F1 score, with up to 37.01% gain on DarkFace. These results demonstrate the promise of agentic detection and establish a solid foundation for its application in complex and dynamic environments.