High-Precision and Lightweight Model for Rapid Safety Helmet Detection

This paper presents significant improvements in the accuracy and computational efficiency of safety helmet detection within industrial environments through the optimization of the you only look once version 5 small (YOLOv5s) model structure and the enhancement of its loss function. We introduce the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to bolster the model’s sensitivity to key features, thereby enhancing detection accuracy. To address potential performance degradation issues associated with the complete intersection over union (CIoU) loss function in the original model, we implement the modified penalty-decay intersection over union (MPDIoU) loss function to achieve more stable and precise bounding box regression. Furthermore, considering the original YOLOv5s model’s large parameter count, we adopt a lightweight design using the MobileNetV3 architecture and replace the original squeeze-and-excitation (SE) attention mechanism with CBAM, significantly reducing computational complexity. These improvements reduce the model’s parameters from 15.7 GFLOPs to 5.7 GFLOPs while increasing the mean average precision (mAP) from 82.34% to 91.56%, demonstrating its superior performance and potential value in practical industrial applications.