SS-YOLOv8: A Lightweight Algorithm for Surface Litter Detection

With the advancement of science and technology, pollution in rivers and water surfaces has increased, impacting both ecology and public health. Timely identification of surface waste is crucial for effective cleanup. Traditional edge detection devices struggle with limited memory and resources, making the YOLOv8 algorithm inefficient. This paper introduces a lightweight network model for detecting water surface litter. We enhance the CSP Bottleneck with a two-convolutions (C2f) module to improve image recognition tasks. By implementing the powerful intersection over union 2 (PIoU2), we enhance model accuracy over the original CIoU. Our novel Shared Convolutional Detection Head (SCDH) minimizes parameters, while the scale layer optimizes feature scaling. Using a slimming pruning method, we further reduce the model’s size and computational needs. Our model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 79.9% on the surface litter dataset, with a compact size of 2.3 MB and a processing rate of 128 frames per second, meeting real-time detection requirements. This work significantly contributes to efficient environmental monitoring and offers a scalable solution for deploying advanced detection models on resource-constrained devices.