Enhanced Helmet Detection in Complex Industrial Environments Using an Improved YOLO-BASED Model

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. 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.