Enhanced Object Detection Algorithms in Complex Environments via Improved CycleGAN Data Augmentation and AS-YOLO...

Object detection in complex environments, such as challenging lighting conditions, adverse weather, and target occlusions, poses significant difficulties for existing algorithms. To address these challenges, this study introduces a collaborative solution integrating improved CycleGAN-based data augmentation and an enhanced object detection framework, AS-YOLO. The improved CycleGAN incorporates a dual self-attention mechanism and spectral normalization to enhance feature capture and training stability. The AS-YOLO framework integrates a channel-spatial parallel attention mechanism, an AFPN structure for improved feature fusion, and the Inner_IoU loss function for better generalization. The experimental results show that compared with YOLOv8n, mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.95 of the AS-YOLO algorithm have increased by 1.5% and 0.6%, respectively. After data augmentation and style transfer, mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.95 have increased by 14.6% and 17.8%, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving the performance of the model in complex scenarios.