Research on Microscale Vehicle Logo Detection Based on Real-Time DEtection TRansformer (RT-DETR)

Vehicle logo detection (VLD) is a critical component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), particularly for vehicle identification and management in dynamic traffic environments. However, traditional object detection methods are often constrained by image resolution, with vehicle logos in existing datasets typically measuring 32 × 32 pixels. In real-world scenarios, the actual pixel size of vehicle logos is significantly smaller, making it challenging to achieve precise recognition in complex environments. To address this issue, we propose a microscale vehicle logo dataset (VLD-Micro) that improves the detection of distant vehicle logos. Building upon the RT-DETR algorithm, we propose a lightweight vehicle logo detection algorithm for long-range vehicle logos. Our approach enhances both the backbone and the neck network. The backbone employs ResNet-34, combined with Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks (SENetV2) and Context Guided (CG) Blocks, to improve shallow feature extraction and global information capture. The neck network employs a Slim-Neck architecture, incorporating an ADown module to replace traditional downsampling convolutions. Experimental results on the VLD-Micro dataset show that, compared to the original model, our approach reduces the number of parameters by approximately 37.6%, increases the average accuracy (mAP@50:95) by 1.5%, and decreases FLOPS by 36.7%. Our lightweight network significantly improves real-time detection performance while maintaining high accuracy in vehicle logo detection.