SGST-YOLOv8: An Improved Lightweight YOLOv8 for Real-Time Target Detection for Campus Surveillance

Real-time target detection plays an important role in campus intelligent surveillance systems. This paper introduces Soft-NMS, GSConv, Triplet Attention, and other advanced technologies to propose a lightweight pedestrian and vehicle detection model named SGST-YOLOv8. In this paper, the improved YOLOv8 model is trained on the self-made dataset, and the tracking algorithm is combined to achieve an accurate and efficient real-time pedestrian and vehicle tracking detection system. The improved model achieved an accuracy of 88.6%, which is 1.2% higher than the baseline model YOLOv8. Additionally, the mAP0.5:0.95 increased by 3.2%. The model parameters and GFLOPS reduced by 5.6% and 7.9%, respectively. In addition, this study also employed the improved YOLOv8 model combined with the bot sort tracking algorithm on the website for actual detection. The results showed that the improved model achieves higher FPS than the baseline YOLOv8 model when detecting the same scenes, with an average increase of 3–5 frames per second. The above results verify the effectiveness of the improved model for real-time target detection in complex environments.