G-YOLO: A YOLOv7-based target detection algorithm for lightweight hazardous chemical vehicles

PLoS One. 2024 Apr 24;19(4):e0299959. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299959. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Hazardous chemical vehicles are specialized vehicles used for transporting flammable gases, medical waste, and liquid chemicals, among other dangerous chemical substances. During their transportation, there are risks of fire, explosion, and leakage of hazardous materials, posing serious threats to human safety and the environment. To mitigate these possible hazards and decrease their probability, this study proposes a lightweight object detection method for hazardous chemical vehicles based on the YOLOv7-tiny model.The method first introduces a lightweight feature extraction structure, E-GhostV2 network, into the trunk and neck of the model to achieve effective feature extraction while reducing the burden of the model. Additionally, the PConv is used in the model's backbone to effectively reduce redundant computations and memory access, thereby enhancing efficiency and feature extraction capabilities. Furthermore, to address the problem of performance degradation caused by overemphasizing high-quality samples, the model adopts the WIoU loss function, which balances the training effect of high-quality and low-quality samples, enhancing the model's robustness and generalization performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved model achieves satisfactory detection accuracy while reducing the number of model parameters, providing robust support for theoretical research and practical applications in the field of hazardous chemical vehicle object detection.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Hazardous Substances* / analysis
  • Humans

Substances

  • Hazardous Substances

Grants and funding

This research was supported in part by the Humanities and Social Sciences Project of the Ministry of Education of China under grant No. 22YJCZH014, National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No. 61602202, Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under contract No. BK20160428, Natural Science Foundation of Education Department of Jiangsu Province under contract No.20KJA520008, National Statistical Science Research General Project under contract No.2021LY005, Future Network Scientific Research Fund Project under contract No.FNSRFP-2021-YB-44 and Opening Foundation of Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Network Security and Cryptology Research Fund(Fujian Normal University) under contract No.NSCL-KF2021-08. Six Talent Peaks project in Jiangsu Province (Grant No.XYDXX-034) and the China Scholarship Council also supported this work.