With the increasing demand for perception in complex road environments in intelligent driving, rapid and accurate identification of paved-road obstacles has become a critical prerequisite for driving safety and comfort. Various types of road obstacles can significantly affect vehicle stability and ride quality. To address this challenge, a lightweight and efficient vision-based obstacle detection framework, termed GroupScale-YOLO, is proposed, in which detection accuracy and computational efficiency are jointly enhanced through the collaborative design of multiple novel modules. First, a dedicated dataset targeting common paved-road obstacles is constructed, and six data augmentation strategies are employed to mitigate the adverse effects of road surface undulations and illumination variations on visual perception. Second, to overcome the limitations of YOLOv11n in paved-road obstacle detection tasks, targeted optimizations are introduced to the backbone network, convolutional blocks, and detection head. Experimental results indicate that GroupScale-YOLO achieves a 29.95% reduction in model parameters while simultaneously increasing mAP@0.5 by 0.6% on the self-built dataset, demonstrating its suitability for deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Furthermore, real-vehicle road tests confirm that the proposed method maintains stable and accurate obstacle detection performance under practical driving conditions, offering a reliable solution for intelligent vehicle environmental perception.
Zou et al. (Sat,) studied this question.