DCGAN Feature-Enhancement-Based YOLOv8n Model in Small-Sample Target Detection

This paper proposes DCGAN-YOLOv8n, an integrated framework that significantly advances small-sample target detection by synergizing generative adversarial feature enhancement with multi-scale representation learning. The model’s core contribution lies in its novel adversarial feature enhancement module (AFEM), which leverages conditional generative adversarial networks to reconstruct discriminative multi-scale features while effectively mitigating mode collapse. Furthermore, the architecture incorporates a deformable multi-scale feature pyramid that dynamically fuses generated high-resolution features with hierarchical semantic representations through an attention mechanism. The proposed triple marginal constraint optimization jointly enhances intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, thereby structuring a highly discriminative feature space. Extensive experiments on the NWPU VHR-10 dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with the model achieving an mAP50 of 90.46% and an mAP50-95 of 57.06%, representing significant improvements of 4.52% and 4.08% over the baseline YOLOv8n, respectively. These results validate the framework’s effectiveness in addressing critical challenges of feature representation scarcity and cross-scale adaptation in data-limited scenarios.