A heterogeneous attention YOLO model for traffic sign detection
摘要
Traffic sign detection plays a pivotal role in enhancing the safety and efficiency of autonomous driving systems. Nevertheless, accurately detecting small, occluded, and visually complex traffic signs remains a significant challenge in real-world environments. To address these issues, this article proposes a Heterogeneous Attention YOLO model (HA-YOLO), a novel framework built upon the YOLOv8 model, designed to improve detection robustness under challenging conditions. The proposed approach incorporates High-level Screening-feature Pyramid Networks (HSFPN) for adaptive multiscale feature fusion, thereby reducing the loss of fine-grained details crucial for small or partially obscured signs. The proposed model also integrates Spatial and Channel Synergistic Attention (SCSA) and Triplet Attention are embedded into the C2f module, forming the C2f-Synergistic Attention (CSA) and C2f-Triplet Attention (CTA) submodules. These attention mechanisms enable the network to focus on salient spatial and semantic information, alleviating false positives and missed detections in complex scenarios. Under the tested conditions, experimental evaluations on TT-100K, CCTSDB, and GTSDB datasets demonstrate that HA-YOLO outperforms the baseline YOLOv8m by 5.1%, 0.6% and 15.9% in mAP@50, respectively, validating its effectiveness in real-world traffic sign detection tasks. The code of the proposed method will be publicly available at https://github.com/dengy1207/HAYOLO.