Detection of Floating Objects on Water Surface Using YOLOv5s in an Edge Computing Environment

Aiming to solve the problems with easy false detection of small targets in river floating object detection and deploying an overly large model, a new method is proposed based on improved YOLOv5s. A new data augmentation method for small objects is designed to enrich the dataset and improve the model's robustness. Distinct feature extraction network levels incorporate different coordinate attention mechanism pooling methods to enhance the effective feature information extraction of small targets and improve small target detection accuracy. Then, a shallow feature map with 4-fold down-sampling is added, and feature fusion is performed using the Feature Pyramid Network. At the same time, bilinear interpolation replaces the up-sampling method to retain feature information and enhance the network's ability to sense small targets. Network complex algorithms are optimized to better adapt to embedded platforms. Finally, the model is channel pruned to solve the problem of difficult deployment. The experimental results show that this method has a better feature extraction capability as well as a higher detection accuracy. Compared with the original YOLOv5 algorithm, the accuracy is improved by 15.7%, the error detection rate is reduced by 83% in small target task detection, the detection accuracy can reach 92.01% in edge testing, and the inference speed can reach 33 frames per second, which can meet the real-time requirements.