SRG-YOLO: Star Operation and Restormer-Based YOLOv11 via Global Context for Vehicle Object Detection

Recently, these conventional object detection methods have certain defects that must be overcome, such as insufficient detection accuracy in complex scenes and low computational efficiency. Then, this paper proposes a Star operation and Restormer-based YOLOv11 model that leverages global context for vehicle detection (SRG-YOLO), which aims to enhance both detection accuracy and efficiency in complex environments. Firstly, during the optimization of YOLOv11n architecture, a Star block is introduced. By enhancing non-linear feature representation, this Star block improves the original C3K2 module, thereby strengthening multi-scale feature fusion and consequently boosting detection accuracy in complex scenarios. Secondly, for the detection heads of YOLOv11n, Restormer is incorporated via the improved C3K2 module to explicitly leverage spatial prior information, optimize the self-attention mechanism, and augment long-range pixel dependencies of YOLOv11n. This integration not only reduces computational complexity but also improves detection precision and overall efficiency through more refined feature modeling. Thirdly, a Context-guided module is integrated to enhance the ability to capture object details using global context. In complex backgrounds, it effectively combines local features with their contextual information, substantially improving the detection robustness of YOLOv11n. Finally, experiments on the VisDrone2019, KITTI, and UA-DETRAC datasets illustrate that SRG-YOLO achieves superior vehicle detection accuracy in complex scenes compared to conventional methods, with particular advantages in small object detection.