GPAC-YOLOv8: lightweight target detection for fire scenarios

Due to the large number of parameters in the deep network model, it is difficult for existing fire detection methods to adapt to limited hardware configurations. In addition, detecting targets in the early stages of a fire is challenging owing to their small size. Therefore, this study presents a novel fire and smoke detection framework called GPAC-YOLOv8, which is based on the YOLOv8 architecture. Firstly, the integration of the ghost module and the Polarized Self-Attention attention mechanism into the backbone culminates in the CGP module, which is designed to improve computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. Next, an innovative feature fusion module, AC-Neck, is developed through the application of the adaptive spatial feature fusion strategy and the lightweight content-aware reassembly of features upsampling mechanism, aiming to optimize feature map fusion and increase small target detection efficiency. Finally, a Focal-WIoU loss function, augmented with a dual weighting mechanism, is formulated to precisely delineate the aspect ratios of the predicted bounding boxes, thereby strengthening the generalization capacity of the model. Experimental results, derived from the application of the proposed GEAC-YOLOv8 method to a specially constructed dataset, show significant improvements in detection speed while maintaining detection accuracy compared to conventional methods. Thus, the GPAC-YOLOv8 framework demonstrably improves the effectiveness of object detection in fire and smoke scenarios.