Optimization Study of Coal Gangue Detection in Intelligent Coal Selection Systems Based on the Improved Yolov8n Model

To address the low recognition accuracy of models for coal gangue images in intelligent coal preparation systems—especially in identifying small target coal gangue due to factors such as camera angle changes, low illumination, and motion blur—we propose an improved coal gangue separation model, Yolov8n-improvedGD(GD—Gangue Detection), based on Yolov8n. The optimization strategy includes integrating the GCBlock(Global Context Block) from GCNet(Global Context Network) into the backbone network to enhance the model’s ability to capture long-range dependencies in images and improve recognition performance. The CGFPN (Contextual Guidance Feature Pyramid Network) module is designed to optimize the feature fusion strategy and enhance the model’s feature expression capabilities. The GSConv-SlimNeck architecture is employed to optimize computational efficiency and enhance feature map fusion capabilities, thereby improving the model’s robustness. A 160 × 160 scale detection head is incorporated to enhance the sensitivity and accuracy of small coal and gangue detection, mitigate the effects of low-quality data, and improve target localization accuracy.