Improving the Detection and Positioning of Camouflaged Objects in YOLOv8

Abstract

Camouflaged objects can be perfectly hidden in the surrounding environment by designing their texture and color. Existing object detection models have high false-negative rates and inaccurate localization for camouflaged objects. To resolve this, we improved the YOLOv8 algorithm based on feature enhancement. In the feature extraction stage, an edge enhancement module was built to enhance the edge feature. In the feature fusion stage, multiple asymmetric convolution branches were introduced to obtain larger receptive fields and achieve multi-scale feature fusion. In the post-processing stage, the existing non-maximum suppression algorithm was improved to address the issue of missed detection caused by overlapping boxes. Additionally, a shape-enhanced data augmentation method was designed to enhance the model’s shape perception of camouflaged objects. Experimental evaluations were carried out on camouflaged object datasets, including COD and CAMO, which are publicly accessible. The improved method exhibits enhancements in detection performance by 8.3% and 9.1%, respectively, compared to the YOLOv8 model.