Enhancing Landslide Detection: A Novel LA-YOLO Model for Rainfall-Induced Shallow Landslides

As a geological disaster widely distributed in the southern regions of China, rainfall-induced shallow landslides pose a significant threat to affected areas. Timely detection of landslides is crucial in the effective response to such disasters. However, landslide detection faces adverse impacts from various factors, such as insufficient sample data, complex model structures, and limitations in detection accuracy during the actual detection process. In this study, high-quality image samples were collected from multiple landslide disaster areas in southern China, and a rainfall-induced shallow landslide sample database was constructed in the region. Based on this, a lightweight attention-guided YOLO model (LA-YOLO) was proposed to improve the detection performance of YOLO model for rainfall-induced shallow landslides. First, CG block is introduced to enhance the C2f module, enriching the feature representation capability through multiscale feature fusion and reducing the model’s parameters and computational complexity. Second, the SimAM attention module is used to focus on the target regions, improving feature extraction effectiveness. Experimental results show that the model parameters of LA-YOLO were reduced by approximately 30%, with precision, recall, and mean average precision (mAP) on the landslide sample dataset increasing by 2.6%, 0.7%, and 2.2%, respectively. While ensuring model detection performance, the model structure was significantly optimized, achieving both lightweight and accuracy goals, confirming the model’s superiority in monitoring rainfall-induced shallow landslide disasters.