EGS-YOLO: A Fast and Reliable Safety Helmet Detection Method Modified Based on YOLOv7

Wearing safety helmets at construction sites is a major measure to prevent safety accidents, so it is essential to supervise and ensure that workers wear safety helmets. This requires a high degree of real-time performance. We improved the network structure based on YOLOv7. To enhance real-time performance, we introduced GhostModule after comparing various modules to create a new efficient structure that generates more feature mappings with fewer linear operations. SE blocks were introduced after comparing several attention mechanisms to highlight important information in the image. The EIOU loss function was introduced to speed up the convergence of the model. Eventually, we constructed the efficient model EGS-YOLO. EGS-YOLO achieves a mAP of 91.1%, 0.2% higher than YOLOv7, and the inference time is 13.3% faster than YOLOv7 at 3.9 ms (RTX 3090). The parameters and computational complexity are reduced by 37.3% and 33.8%, respectively. The enhanced real-time performance while maintaining the original high precision can meet actual detection requirements.