A Lightweight Improved YOLOv8-Based Method for Rebar Intersection Detection

Abstract

As industrialized construction and smart building continue to advance, rebar-tying robots place higher demands on the real-time and accurate recognition of rebar intersections and their tying status. Existing deep learning-based detection methods generally rely on heavy backbone networks and complex feature-fusion structures, making it difficult to deploy them efficiently on resource-constrained mobile robots and edge devices, and there is also a lack of dedicated datasets for rebar intersections. In this study, 12,000 rebar mesh images were collected and annotated from two indoor scenes and one outdoor scene to construct a rebar-intersection dataset that supports both object detection and instance segmentation, enabling simultaneous learning of intersection locations and tying status. On this basis, a lightweight improved YOLOv8-based method for rebar intersection detection and segmentation is proposed. The original backbone is replaced with ShuffleNetV2, and a C2f_Dual residual module is introduced in the neck; the same improvements are further transferred to YOLOv8-seg to form a unified lightweight detection–segmentation framework for joint prediction of intersection locations and tying status. Experimental results show that, compared with the original YOLOv8L and several mainstream detectors, the proposed model achieves comparable or superior performance in terms of mAP@50, precision and recall, while reducing model size and computational cost by 51.2% and 58.1%, respectively, and significantly improving inference speed. The improved YOLOv8-seg also achieves satisfactory contour alignment and regional consistency for rebar regions and intersection masks. Owing to its combination of high accuracy and low resource consumption, the proposed method is well suited for deployment on edge-computing devices used in rebar-tying robots and construction quality inspection, providing an effective visual perception solution for intelligent construction.