DFE-YOLO: A Multi-Scale-Enhanced Detection Network for Dense Object Detection in Traffic Monitoring

The accuracy of object detection is crucial for the safety and efficiency of traffic management in monitoring systems. Existing detectors, however, struggle significantly within complex urban scenarios where high-density occlusions among the targets occur, as well as extreme scale variations resulting from the size differences of vehicles and distance variations to the camera. To remedy these issues, we introduce DFE-YOLO, an enhanced multi-scale detection framework built upon YOLOv8 that fuses features from various layers at different scales through our ‘four adaptive spatial feature fusion’ module, which performs adaptive spatial fusion via learnable weights normalized by softmax and thereby allows effective feature aggregation across scales. The second contribution is DySample, which uses a lightweight, content-aware, point-based upsampling method to improve multi-scale feature representation as well as reduce imbalance across different object scales. The experiments conducted on the VisDrone-2019 and BDD100K benchmarks showed significantly superior performance against state-of-the-art detectors. Specifically, DFE-YOLO achieved a +4% and +5.1% boost over YOLOv10 in AP and APsmall. This study offers a useful fix for smart transport systems.