Edge-YOLO: Lightweight Infrared Object Detection Method Deployed on Edge Devices

Existing target detection algorithms for infrared road scenes are often computationally intensive and require large models, which makes them unsuitable for deployment on edge devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight infrared target detection method, called Edge-YOLO, to address these challenges. Our approach replaces the backbone network of the YOLOv5m model with a lightweight ShuffleBlock and a strip depthwise convolutional attention module. We also applied CAU-Lite as the up-sampling operator and EX-IoU as the bounding box loss function. Our experiments demonstrate that, compared with YOLOv5m, Edge-YOLO is 70.3% less computationally intensive, 71.6% smaller in model size, and 44.4% faster in detection speed, while maintaining the same level of detection accuracy. As a result, our method is better suited for deployment on embedded platforms, making effective infrared target detection in real-world scenarios possible.