Safety Helmet Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8

Wearing safety helmets can effectively reduce the risk of head injuries for construction workers in high-altitude falls. In order to address the low detection accuracy of existing safety helmet detection algorithms for small targets and complex environments in various scenes, this study proposes an improved safety helmet detection algorithm based on YOLOv8, named YOLOv8n-SLIM-CA. For data augmentation, the mosaic data augmentation method is employed, which generates many tiny targets. In the backbone network, a coordinate attention (CA) mechanism is added to enhance the focus on safety helmet regions in complex backgrounds, suppress irrelevant feature interference, and improve detection accuracy. In the neck network, a slim-neck structure fuses features of different sizes extracted by the backbone network, reducing model complexity while maintaining accuracy. In the detection layer, a small target detection layer is added to enhance the algorithm’s learning ability for crowded small targets. Experimental results indicate that, through these algorithm improvements, the detection performance of the algorithm has been enhanced not only in general scenarios of real-world applicability but also in complex backgrounds and for small targets at long distances. Compared to the YOLOv8n algorithm, YOLOv8n-SLIM-CA shows improvements of 1.462%, 2.969%, 2.151%, and 3.549% in precision, recall, mAP50, and mAP50-95 metrics, respectively. Additionally, YOLOv8n-SLIM-CA reduces the model parameters by 6.98% and the computational load by 9.76%. It is capable of real-time and accurate detection of safety helmet wear. Comparison with other mainstream object detection algorithms validates the effectiveness and superiority of this method.