MADF-YOLOv8: A Lightweight Model for Road Distress Detection Based on Adaptive Multiscale Feature Fusion

Abstract

Efficient road distress detection is crucial for transportation safety. To address the challenge of balancing detection accuracy, efficiency, and multi-scale feature fusion in existing methods, this paper proposes a lightweight model named MADF-YOLOv8. The model enhances multi-scale feature extraction capability by introducing the Multi-Scale Ghost Residual Convolution (MSGRConv) and the Multiscale Adaptive Feature Processing Module (MAFP). Furthermore, it constructs a Multi-scale Dynamic sampling Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (MD-BiFPN) and incorporates the C2f-Faster module to optimize feature fusion efficiency. Experiments on the RDD2022 dataset demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a mean Average Precision at 0.5 Intersection over Union ([email protected]) of 88.6% with only 2.312 million parameters. Its overall performance surpasses various mainstream detectors, achieving an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.