Real-Time Multi-Scale Object Detection in Surveillance Using Hybrid Transformer Architecture

Real-time surveillance systems require accurate and efficient object detection to ensure safety and situational awareness. Existing methods, such as YOLOv5 and Vision Transformer-based detectors, often struggle to reliably identify small, distant, or occluded objects while maintaining real-time inference, limiting their applicability in complex surveillance environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes PRISM, a hybrid Transformer–YOLOv8 framework that integrates fast local feature extraction with global contextual refinement. The method introduces two novel components: i) a Context-Aware Feed Forward Network (CA-FFN) within the Vision Transformer (ViT), which dynamically weights channel features to reduce redundancy and enhance global context modeling, and ii) Cross-Scale Attention Skip Connections (CSASC) for selective fusion of multi-scale YOLOv8 and ViT features, improving detection of small or occluded objects. The model is implemented in PyTorch and trained on a comprehensive surveillance dataset consisting of pedestrians, vehicles, bicycles, bags, and miscellaneous objects. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that PRISM achieves 96% accuracy, a significant improvement of ~4–5% over baseline methods, with robust performance across all object categories. Key performance indicators verify the reliability of the model to real-time usage, and the lightweight design makes it edge deployable. These findings imply that PRISM can be used to provide a speed-accuracy balance in a complex and dynamic setting, which is more efficient than the current methods. The study also notes the partial extensions, such as the incorporation of multi-sensors and continuous video streams to do time modeling as an extension, which will offer a good base to the next-generation intelligent surveillance systems.