Introduction: Acupoint localization is integral to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) acupuncture diagnosis and treatment. Employing intelligent detection models for recognizing facial acupoints can substantially enhance localization accuracy.
Methods: This study introduces an advancement in the YOLOv8-pose keypoint detection algorithm, tailored for facial acupoints, and named YOLOv8-ACU. This model enhances acupoint feature extraction by integrating ECA attention, replaces the original neck module with a lighter Slim-neck module, and improves the loss function for GIoU.
Results: The YOLOv8-ACU model achieves impressive accuracy, with an mAP@0.5 of 97.5% and an mAP@0.5-0.95 of 76.9% on our self-constructed datasets. It also marks a reduction in model parameters by 0.44M, model size by 0.82 MB, and GFLOPs by 9.3%.
Discussion: With its enhanced recognition accuracy and efficiency, along with good generalization ability, YOLOv8-ACU provides significant reference value for facial acupoint localization and detection. This is particularly beneficial for Chinese medicine practitioners engaged in facial acupoint research and intelligent detection.
Keywords: Chinese medicine acupoints; ECA-net; GIoU; YOLOv8-pose; keypoint detection; slim-neck.
Copyright © 2024 Yuan, Shao, Li, Wang, Zhu, Qiu, Chen, Tang and Han.