An improved YOLOv8 safety helmet wearing detection network

Abstract In the field of industrial safety, wearing helmets plays a vital role in ensuring workers’ health. Aiming at addressing the complex background in the industrial environment, caused by differences in distance, the helmet small target wearing detection methods for misdetection and omission detection problems are needed. An improved YOLOv8 safety helmet wearing detection network is proposed to enhance the capture of details, improve multiscale feature processing and improve the accuracy of small target detection by introducing Dilation-wise residual attention module, atrous spatial pyramid pooling and normalized Wasserstein distance loss function. Experiments were conducted on the SHWD dataset, and the results showed that the mAP of the improved network improved to 92.0%, which exceeded that of the traditional target detection network in terms of accuracy, recall, and other key metrics. These findings further improved the detection of helmet wearing in complex environments and greatly enhanced the accuracy of detection.