Research on Improving the High Precision and Lightweight Diabetic Retinopathy Detection of YOLOv8n

Abstract: Early detection and diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy is one of the current research focuses in ophthalmology. However, due to the subtle features of micro-lesions and their susceptibility to background interference, ex-isting detection methods still face many challenges in terms of accuracy and robustness. To address these issues, a lightweight and high-precision detection model based on the improved YOLOv8n, named YOLO-KFG, is proposed. Firstly, a new dynamic convolution KWConv and C2f-KW module are designed to improve the backbone network, enhancing the model's ability to perceive micro-lesions. Secondly, a fea-ture-focused diffusion pyramid network FDPN is designed to fully integrate multi-scale context information, further improving the model's ability to perceive micro-lesions. Finally, a lightweight shared detection head GSDHead is designed to reduce the model's parameter count, making it more deployable on re-source-constrained devices. Experimental results show that compared with the base model YOLOv8n, the improved model reduces the parameter count by 20.7%, increases [email protected] by 4.1%, and improves the recall rate by 7.9%. Compared with single-stage mainstream algorithms such as YOLOv5n and YOLOv10n, YOLO-KFG demonstrates significant advantages in both detection accuracy and efficiency.