FE-YOLO: A Lightweight Model for Construction Waste Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8 Model

Construction waste detection under complex scenarios poses significant challenges due to low detection accuracy, high computational complexity, and large parameter volume in existing models. These challenges are critical as accurate and efficient detection is essential for effective waste management in the construction industry, which is increasingly focused on sustainability and resource optimization. This paper aims to address the low accuracy of detection, high computational complexity, and large parameter volume in the models of construction waste detection under complex scenarios. For this purpose, an improved YOLOv8-based algorithm called FE-YOLO is proposed in this paper. This algorithm replaces the C2f module in the backbone with the Faster_C2f module and integrates the ECA attention mechanism into the bottleneck layer. Also, a custom multi-class construction waste dataset is created for evaluation. FE-YOLO achieves an mAP@50 of 92.7% on this dataset, up by 3% compared to YOLOv8n. Meanwhile, the parameter count and floating-point operations are scaled down by 12% and 13%, respectively. Finally, a test is conducted on a publicly available construction waste dataset. The test results demonstrate the excellent performance of this algorithm in generalization and robustness.

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