Improved YOLOv10: A Real-Time Object Detection Approach in Complex Environments

Object detection of small and occluded targets in complex scenarios is a vital yet challenging task in computer vision, with applications in intelligent systems (e.g., kitchen safety supervision). To address limitations of existing models, this study proposes an improved YOLOv10 algorithm with three key innovations. We first introduce a Mosaic-9 data augmentation strategy to enhance small target density in training samples. The traditional PANet in YOLOv10 is replaced by the Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN), which uses cross-scale bidirectional connections and learnable weights to optimize multi-scale feature fusion. A Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) channel attention module is integrated into the CSPDarknet backbone to emphasize key feature channels and mitigate background interference for occluded objects. Experiments on a self-constructed dataset (6508 images with multi-scale and occluded targets) show the improved YOLOv10 achieves 69.5% mAP@0.5, a 7.7 percentage point increase over YOLOv10n, while maintaining 12.1 ms inference speed. Ablation studies verify Mosaic-9 enhances small target perception, BiFPN boosts mAP@0.5 by 5.7%, and SE improves occlusion robustness by 4.8%. This work offers a generalizable multi-module optimization framework for YOLO-series models, applicable to various small and occluded target detection tasks, advancing lightweight object detection algorithms and intelligent vision systems.