PCPE-YOLO: A Lightweight Object Detection Framework with Dynamic Reconfigurable Backbone for Enhanced Small Object Recognition

In the domain of object detection, small object detection remains a pressing challenge, as existing approaches often suffer from limited accuracy, high model complexity, and difficulty meeting lightweight deployment requirements. In this paper, we propose PCPE-YOLO, a novel object detection algorithm, specifically designed to address these difficulties. First, we put forward a dynamic, reconfigurable C2f backbone and refine it to create the C2f_PIG module. This module uses a parameter-aware mechanism to adapt its bottleneck structures to different network depths and widths, reducing parameters while maintaining performance. Next, we introduce a Context Anchor Attention mechanism that boosts the model’s focus on the contexts of small objects, thereby improving detection accuracy. In addition, we add a small object detection layer to enhance the model’s localization capability for small objects. Finally, we integrate an Efficient Up-Convolution Block to sharpen decoder feature maps, enhancing small object recall with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on VisDrone2019, KITTI, and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show that PCPE-YOLO significantly outperforms both the baseline and other state-of-the-art methods in precision, recall, mean average precision, and parameters, achieving the best precision among all compared approaches. On VisDrone2019 in particular, it achieves improvements of 3.8% in precision, 5.6% in recall, 6.2% in mAP50, and 5% in F1 score, effectively combining lightweight design with high small object detection performance and providing a more efficient and reliable solution for small object detection in real-world applications.