Las-yolo: a lightweight detection method based on YOLOv7 for small objects in airport surveillance

The civil aviation transportation has sustained rapid growth, which poses significant challenges in ensuring airport safety and efficiency of use. Persons and vehicles are tiny targets in airport surveillance. Existing detection methods are difficult to detect accurately. Enhancing small target detection by only the method of adding enhancement modules inevitably leads to increased network parameters. To address the above issues, this article proposes a lightweight airport surveillance detection based on YOLOv7 named LAS-YOLO. Firstly, we design the lightweight basic module, which significantly reduces network parameters while retaining certain local features. Secondly, we replace the SPPCSPC module with the spatial pyramid pooling-fast module with fewer parameters, further reducing the quantity of network parameters. Finally, the attention mechanism and small object detection layer are introduced to enhance small object detection accuracy. The efficient channel attention module is selected among three attention methods by experiments. We simulate the application process of object detection methods in airport surveillance, training on high-performance computers and testing on lower-performance computer. This article verifies the performance of the proposed method on the public ASS dataset consisting of the airport surface surveillance dataset (ASS1) and panoramic surveillance dataset (ASS2). The experiment shows that the parameters of LAS-YOLO are 12.5 M, which is 34.2 \(\%\) $\%$ of the original model. The mean average precision is 89.8 \(\%\) $\%$ on the ASS1. This proposed method enhances the average precision for airplane and vehicle detection by 14.5 \(\%\) $\%$ and 22.7 \(\%\) $\%$ compared to YOLOv7 on the ASS2. In order to reflect the robustness of the model in airport surveillance, we conduct another experiment using airplane data from the ROSD. The experiment demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method over other models in airport surveillance. Code is available at https://zenodo.org/records/10969930.