UAV Vehicle Detection System Based on YOLOv8

Abstract To utilize the drone vehicle detection technology to observe the road traffic conditions in real-time, thereby improving the operational effectiveness and safety of the traffic system, this paper adopts a vehicle target detection algorithm based on YOLOv8. YOLOv8 is the latest iteration developed by Ultralytics, which has further improvements and enhancements compared to YOLOv5. In the backbone network, YOLOv8 employs a C2f structure with richer gradient flow, boosting feature selection capabilities, and enhancing target detection performance and accuracy; In the detection head, YOLOv8 utilizes a Decoupled Head design and uses an improved Anchor-Free method to reduce computational complexity while improving detection efficiency; In terms of loss function, YOLOv8 utilizes the The Task-Aligned Assigner positive sample allocation strategy, and adds the Distribution Focal Loss to improve the model’s generalization ability. This paper divides the vehicles data set into 5 types, trains it using a pre-training model, and optimizes the network parameters through multiple iterations to achieve better detection performance. The experimental results indicate that YOLOv8 reaches the mAP of over 97% on the experimental data set, which is an improvement of approximately 8% compared to YOLOv5, and achieves a good detection performance, and is highly practical.