Nighttime vehicle target detection based on visual features

This study proposes an algorithm based on an improved YOLOv8s for nighttime vehicle recognition under low light and complex background conditions, addressing issues such as shallow feature loss, low recognition accuracy for occluded targets, and bounding box distortion. The core optimization strategies are as follows: First, RepGFPN (Re-parameterized Generalized Feature Pyramid Network) employs re-parameterized fusion, utilizing a customized fusion module to achieve multi-scale feature interaction. This preserves shallow-level details while eliminating redundant sampling and adjusting channels to enhance fusion efficiency. Second, the DAT (Deformable Attention Transformer) attention mechanism generates reference grids, while the Lightweight Network predicts deformation point offsets. Bilinear interpolation extracts key features, enhancing learning capabilities for small-sized and occluded targets. Third, the MPDIoU (Minimum Point Distance Intersection over Union) loss function minimizes Euclidean distances between bounding box corners, integrating intersection-over-union optimization to mitigate deformation caused by vehicle overlap. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance over the original model: accuracy improved by 6.4%, recall increased by 4.9%, latency reduced by 6.3 ms, mAP0.5 was boosted by 4.4%, and N_Params decreased by 2.5.