Lightweight Helmet-Wearing Detection Algorithm Based on StarNet-YOLOv10

The safety helmet is the equipment that construction workers must wear, and it plays an important role in protecting their lives. However, there are still many construction workers who do not pay attention to the wearing of helmets. Therefore, the real-time high-precision intelligent detection of construction workers’ helmet wearing is crucial. To this end, this paper proposes a lightweight helmet-wearing detection algorithm based on StarNet-YOLOv10. Firstly, the StarNet network structure is used to replace the backbone network part of the original YOLOv10 model while retaining the original Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast (SPPF) and Partial Self-attention (PSA) parts. Secondly, the C2f module in the neck network is optimised by combining the PSA attention module and the GhostBottleneckv2 module, which improves the extraction of feature information and the expression ability of the model. Finally, optimisation is performed in the head network by introducing the Large Separable Kernel Attention (LSKA) attention mechanism to improve the detection accuracy and detection efficiency of the detection head. The experimental results show that compared with the existing Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5s, YOLOv6, and the original YOLOv10 models, the StarNet-YOLOv10 model proposed in this paper has a greater degree of improvement in the accuracy, recall, average precision mean, computational volume, and frame rate, in which the accuracy is as high as 83.36%, the recall rate can be up to 81.17%, and the average precision mean can reach 78.66%. Meanwhile, compared with the original YOLOv10 model, this model improves 1.7% in accuracy, 1.62% in recall, and 4.43% in mAP. Therefore, the present model can well meet the detection requirements of helmet wearing and can effectively reduce the safety hazards caused by not wearing helmets on construction sites.