Improved Lightweight YOLOv8n with Dynamic Sampling Convolution and CBAM Attention for UAV Wildlife Detection

When UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) carry out wildlife inspection for biodiversity protection, there are challenges such as low target, complex background, variable shape and serious occlusion, which lead to insufficient accuracy and a high misjudgment rate of the existing lightweight detection model. We propose an improved lightweight YOLOv8n model, which aims to achieve higher accuracy and more real-time animal target detection under the UAV platform. To address the issue of small target features being easily lost in the deep network, we introduce a dynamic upsampling convolution for accurate feature-aware upsampling, which can effectively reconstructs target details and suppress background noise. In order to enhance the feature discrimination ability of the model in complex environments, a convolution block attention mechanism was integrated in the model, and the key features of the target were adaptively focused through the channel–spatial dual attention mechanism. Finally, in order to improve the positioning accuracy in dense and occluded scenes, we used MPDIoU loss function to optimize the bounding box regression, and achieve more stable and accurate alignment by minimizing the vertex distance between the prediction box and the real box. Experiments on public data sets show that the detection accuracy and efficiency of the proposed model are significantly improved compared with the original YOLOv8n: the number of model parameters is reduced by 10.7%, the amount of calculation is reduced by 9.9%, and the inference speed is improved by 25%. In terms of comprehensive performance, our method achieved a mAP@0.5 of 96.4%, a mAP@0.5:0.95 improvement of 6.0 percentage points, and an F1 score of 93.5%, while also significantly reducing the false positive rate. Experiments on self-made aerial animal data sets further fully verify that the algorithm can achieve high-precision real-time animal target detection in the actual UAV platform.