Research on Improved YOLOv7 for Traffic Obstacle Detection

Object detection and recognition algorithms are widely used in applications such as real-time monitoring and autonomous driving. However, there is limited research on traffic obstacle detection in complex scenarios involving road construction and sudden accidents. This gap results in low accuracy and difficulties in recognizing occluded targets, thereby hindering the further development and widespread adoption of intelligent transportation systems. To address these issues, this paper proposes an improved algorithm based on YOLOv7, incorporating a lightweight coordinate attention mechanism to focus on small objects at long distances and capture target location information. The use of a high receptive field enhances the feature hierarchy within the detection network. Additionally, we introduce the focal efficient intersection over union loss function to address sample imbalance, which accelerates the model’s convergence speed, reduces loss values, and improves overall model stability. Our model achieved a detection accuracy of 98.1%, reflecting a 1.4% increase, while also enhancing detection speed and minimizing missed detections. These advancements significantly bolster the model’s performance, demonstrating advantages for real-world applications.