YOLO-CBF: Optimized YOLOv7 Algorithm for Helmet Detection in Road Environments

Abstract

Helmet-wearing detection for electric vehicle riders is essential for traffic safety, yet existing detection models often suffer from high target occlusion and low detection accuracy in complex road environments. To address these issues, this paper proposes YOLO-CBF, an improved YOLOv7-based detection network. The proposed model integrates coordinate convolution to enhance spatial information perception, optimizes the Focal EIOU loss function, and incorporates the BiFormer dynamic sparse attention mechanism to achieve more efficient computation and dynamic content perception. These enhancements enable the model to extract key features more effectively, improving detection precision. Experimental results show that YOLO-CBF achieves an average mAP of 95.6% for helmet-wearing detection in various scenarios, outperforming the original YOLOv7 by 4%. Additionally, YOLO-CBF demonstrates superior performance compared to other mainstream object detection models, achieving accurate and reliable helmet detection for electric vehicle riders.