Recognition algorithm for laboratory protective equipment based on improved YOLOv7

In the university laboratory environment, it is not uncommon for individual laboratory personnel to be inadequately aware of laboratory safety standards and to fail to wear protective equipment (helmets, goggles, masks) in accordance with the prescribed norms. Manual inspection is costly and prone to leakage, and there is an urgent need to develop an efficient and intelligent detection technology. Video surveillance of laboratory protective equipment reveals that these items possess the characteristics of small targets. In light of this, a laboratory protective equipment recognition method based on the improved YOLOv7 algorithm is proposed. The Global Attention Mechanism (GAM) is introduced into the Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (ELAN) structure to construct an ELAN-G module that takes both global and local features into account. The Normalized Gaussian Wasserstein Distance (NWD) metric is introduced to replace the Complete Intersection over Union (CIoU), which improves the network's ability to detect small targets of protective equipment under experimental complex scenarios. In order to evaluate the robustness of the studied algorithm and to address the current lack of personal protective Equipment (PPE) datasets, a laboratory protective equipment dataset was constructed based on multidimensionality for the detection experiments of the algorithm. The experimental results demonstrated that the improved model achieved a mAP value of 84.2 %, representing a 2.3 % improvement compared to the original model, a 5 % improvement in the detection rate, and a 2 % improvement in the Micro-F1 score. In comparison to the prevailing algorithms, the accuracy of the studied algorithm has been markedly enhanced. The approach addresses the challenge of the challenging detection of small targets of protective equipment in complex scenarios in laboratories, and plays a pivotal role in perfecting laboratory safety management system.