Continuous Tracking and Recognition of Small Objects in Video Streams Based on YOLO and Spatio-Temporal Contextual Memory Networks

Small objects in video streams occupy a small proportion in the image; the texture and shape information they carry is limited, making it difficult to continuously track and identify. To solve this problem, a method for continuous tracking and recognition of small objects in the video stream based on YOLO and spatio-temporal context memory network is proposed. A backbone network based on the improved YOLOv8 model is introduced, and the multi-scale visual features of small objects are extracted at different levels of the video stream using the wavelet pooling module. A mixed attention module enhances the feature response in the spatially significant pixel regions, generating weighted multi-scale visual features. The neck network processes these weighted features through a spatio-temporal context memory network to extract multi-scale spatio-temporal features. Then, a bidirectional feature pyramid module fuses these multi-scale spatio-temporal features. The head network processes the fused features to output continuous recognition results for small objects. Experiments show that the proposed method successfully extracts the spatiotemporal features of small objects from video stream data sets dominated by small objects. Under different conditions of small object occlusion rates, this method achieves a success rate of continuous tracking and recognition of small objects over 0.93.