Smoking-YOLOv8: a novel smoking detection algorithm for chemical plant personnel

This study aims to address the challenges of detecting smoking behavior among workers in chemical plant environments. Smoking behavior is difficult to discern in images, with the cigarette occupying only a small pixel area, compounded by the complex background of chemical plants. Traditional models struggle to accurately capture smoking features, leading to feature loss, reduced recognition accuracy, and issues like false positives and missed detections. To overcome these challenges, we have developed a smoking behavior recognition method based on the YOLOv8 model, named Smoking-YOLOv8. Our approach introduces an SD attention mechanism that focuses on the smoking areas within images. By aggregating information from different positions through weighted averaging, it effectively manages long-distance dependencies and suppresses irrelevant background noise, thereby enhancing detection performance. Furthermore, we utilize Wise-IoU as the regression loss for bounding boxes, along with a rational gradient distribution strategy that prioritizes samples of average quality to improve the model’s precision in localization. Finally, the introduction of SPPCSPC and PConv modules in the neck section of the network allows for multi-faceted feature extraction from images, reducing redundant computation and memory access, and effectively extracting spatial features to balance computational load and optimize network architecture. Experimental results on a custom dataset of smoking behavior in chemical plants show that our model outperforms the standard YOLOv8 model in mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) by 6.18%, surpassing other mainstream models in overall performance.