Small target detection algorithm for flapping wing UAV based on improved YOLOv8

This paper proposes an algorithm based on an improved version of YOLOv8l, which is designed for small target detection on flapping wing drones. By adding a small object detection layer and introducing Multi-head self-attention (MHSA), the algorithm effectively reduces interference from irrelevant backgrounds and enhances the network's feature extraction performance. Experimental results on both the flapping wing dataset and the VisDrone dataset demonstrate that compared with the baseline YOLOv8l algorithm, the improved algorithm shows a 4.1% and 3.3% improvement in the mAP@.5 and mAP@.5:.95 indicators, respectively, and a 5.9% and 4% improvement on the VisDrone dataset. Particularly noteworthy is the improved algorithm's performance on the mAP@.5 index, which achieved 50.1% on the VisDrone dataset, proving its robustness and exceptional performance in small target detection. These results illustrate the algorithm's effectiveness and practicality, making it a valuable tool for flapping wing UAV vision applications.