Lightweight Power Line Defect Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8n

To address the challenges of small targets, severe background clutter, and high deployment cost in UAV-based power-line defect detection, this paper proposes a lightweight defect detection model based on an improved YOLOv8n. In the downsampling stage, we design an improved lightweight adaptive downsampling module (ADownPro) to replace part of conventional convolutions, which uses a dual-branch parallel structure for stronger feature interaction and depthwise separable convolutions (DSConv) for complexity reduction. In the feature extraction stage, an integration of cross-stage partial connections and partial convolution (CSPPC) is proposed to replace the C2F module for efficient multi-scale feature fusion. In the detection head, mixed local channel attention (MLCA), which combines channel-spatial information and local–global contextual features, is introduced to strengthen defect-focused representations under complex backgrounds. For the loss function, a scale-annealed mixed-quality EIoU loss (SAMQ-EIoU) is proposed by combining iso-center scale transformation, scale factor annealing and focal-style quality reweighting to improve localization accuracy at high IoU thresholds. Experiments on a constructed dataset covering six typical defect categories show that the improved YOLOv8n achieves 91.4% mAP@0.50 and 64.5% mAP@0.50:0.95, with only 1.59 M parameters and 4.9 GFLOPs. Compared with mainstream detectors, the proposed model achieves a better balance between detection accuracy and lightweight design. In particular, compared with the recently proposed YOLOv8n-DSN and IDD-YOLO, it improves mAP@0.50 by 0.6% and 0.8%, and mAP@0.50:0.95 by 1.2% and 4.8%, respectively, while further reducing the parameter count by 1.00 M and 1.26 M, and the FLOPs by 1.7 G and 0.2 G. Moreover, the cross-dataset evaluation on the public UPID and SFID datasets further demonstrate the robustness and generalization ability of the proposed method.