Optimized YOLOv8 framework for intelligent rockfall detection on mountain roads

Rockfalls on mountainous roads pose significant safety risks to pedestrians and vehicles, particularly in remote areas with underdeveloped communication infrastructure. To enable efficient detection, this study proposes a rockfall detection system based on embedded technology and an improved Yolov8 algorithm, termed Yolov8-GCB. The algorithm enhances detection performance through the following optimizations: (1) integrating a lightweight DeepLabv3+ road segmentation module at the input stage to generate mask images, which effectively exclude non-road regions from interference; (2) replacing Conv convolution units in the backbone network with Ghost convolution units, significantly reducing model parameters and computational cost while improving inference speed; (3) introducing the CPCA (Channel Priori Convolution Attention) mechanism to strengthen the feature extraction capability for targets with diverse shapes; and (4) incorporating skip connections and weighted fusion in the Neck feature extraction network to enhance multi-scale object detection. Experimental results demonstrate that Yolov8-GCB improves [email protected] and [email protected] by 1.2% and 1%, respectively, while reducing the number of parameters by 14.1% and the GFLOPs by 16.1% and increasing inference speed by 20.65%. This method provides an effective technological solution for real-time rockfall detection on embedded devices and can be extended to other disaster scenarios, such as landslides and debris flows, in regions with limited infrastructure.