Abstract
The perception system is the core component of self-driving cars, and a reliable perception system is a key condition for the secure and reliable operation of autonomous vehicles in various complex situations. To improve object detection performance in complex scenes, this study proposes a lightweight and efficient detection framework by integrating three key components. First, Receptive Field Attention Convolution (RFAConv) is introduced to optimize spatial feature representation within the receptive field, enhancing the model’s ability to focus on target regions and improving detection accuracy for small and cluttered objects. Second, the Top-K Sparse Kernel Attention (TKSA) mechanism selectively attends to the most relevant feature areas in the backbone, improving long-range perception while maintaining computational efficiency. Finally, Focaler-IoU is adopted as the bounding box regression loss to dynamically adjust the contribution of samples based on their IoU, improving stability and accelerating training convergence. Together, these enhancements significantly boost detection accuracy and robustness, particularly in challenging environments. Assessments performed on the KITTI datasets show that our detection algorithms achieve mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 83% and 55.4%, respectively. In comparison with the baseline model YOLOv11n, our approach delivers notable performance gains, with improvements of 5.2% and 3.9%.
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Author 1 was responsible for the project design, manuscript review, and editing; Author 2 contributed key conceptual ideas, methodology, analysis of experimental data, and manuscript writing; Author 3 handled data acquisition and the review of relevant literature; Author 4 was in charge of software environment configuration and the review and validation of experimental results; Author 5 organized the experimental data and created the Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6; Author 6 organized the experimental data and prepared Figs. 1, 2, 3 and 4. All authors reviewed and approved the manuscript.
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Sun, Y., Zhen, M., Ma, Y. et al. RTF-YOLO: an efficient object detection framework for autonomous vehicles. SIViP 19, 993 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-025-04585-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-025-04585-8