AE-LFOG-YOLO: robust safety helmet detection via adaptive anchors and illumination invariant learning

In high-risk industrial environments such as tunnel construction, reliable safety helmet detection is critical for preventing head injuries. However, severe illumination inhomogeneity and multi-scale object appearances pose significant challenges to existing detectors due to static anchor designs and the absence of illumination-aware feature learning. This paper proposes AE-LFOG-YOLO, an end-to-end framework that enhances YOLOv8 through dual physics-informed optimizations. The approach integrates an Illumination-Invariant Module (IIM) that employs a dual-path feature decoupling strategy to suppress lighting artifacts within the network backbone. Concurrently, the Adaptive Evolutionary - Light Field Optimized Generation (AE-LFOG) algorithm replaces static anchors with a dynamic evolutionary process guided by local illumination gradients and thin-lens imaging principles, enabling continuous optimization of anchor parameters during training. Evaluated on a real-world tunnel dataset, the method achieves 94.83% mAP@0.5 and significantly improves robustness under challenging illumination variations, as evidenced by a 35.7% extension in effective operating range. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating physical imaging priors into deep learning for robust visual perception in complex industrial scenarios.