Real-Time Lightweight Vehicle Object Detection via Layer-Adaptive Model Pruning

With the rapid advancement in autonomous driving technology, vehicle object detection has become a crucial component of perception systems, where accuracy and inference speed directly influence driving safety. To address the limitations of existing lightweight detection models in small-object perception and deployment efficiency, this study proposes an enhanced YOLOv8n-based framework, termed YOLOv8n-ALM. The proposed model integrates Mixed Local Channel Attention (MLCA), a Task-Aligned Dynamic Detection Head (TADDH), and Layer-Adaptive Magnitude-based Pruning (LAMP). Specifically, MLCA enhances the representation of salient regions, TADDH aligns classification and regression tasks while leveraging DCNv2 for improved spatial adaptability, and LAMP compresses the network to accelerate inference. Experiments conducted on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that YOLOv8n-ALM improves mAP@0.5 by 2.2% and precision by 5.8%, while reducing parameters by 65.33% and computational load by 29.63%. These results underscore the proposed method’s capability to achieve real-time, compact, and accurate vehicle detection, demonstrating strong potential for deployment in intelligent vehicles and embedded systems.