Real-time detection of rare roadside obstacles using YOLOv8-n in autonomous vehicles

Rare road obstacles, including traffic cones, fallen trees, debris, barrels, and rocks, pose significant safety risks to autonomous vehicles. This paper presents a lightweight real-time detection framework using YOLOv8-n to accurately identify such obstacles on resource-constrained hardware. Multiple open source datasets containing annotated images of rare objects were combined and curated into a unified dataset. The model was refined using transfer learning, and its resilience to changing illumination and partial occlusion was enhanced by data augmentation techniques such brightness fluctuation, rotation, flipping, and geometric distortion. On a mid-range NVIDIA P100 GPU, the model maintained an inference speed of 68 frames per second while achieving a precision of 95.4%, recall of 93.9%, F1-score of 94.6%, and mean average precision (mAP@0.5) of 98.1%. These findings show that the framework is appropriate for edge-based autonomous driving systems where low latency and computational efficiency are crucial since it provides precise real-time detection without the need for expensive hardware.