SDO-YOLO: A Lightweight and Efficient Road Object Detection Algorithm Based on Improved YOLOv11

Background: In the field of autonomous driving, existing object detection algorithms still face challenges such as excessive parameter counts and insufficient detection accuracy, particularly when handling dense targets, occlusions, distant small targets, and variable backgrounds in complex road scenarios, where balancing real-time performance and accuracy remains difficult. Methods: This study introduces the SDO-YOLO algorithm, an enhancement of YOLOv11n. First, to significantly reduce the parameter count while preserving feature representation capabilities, spatial-channel reconstruction convolution is employed to enhance the HGNetv2 network, streamlining redundant computations in feature extraction. Then, a large-kernel separable attention mechanism is introduced, decoupling two-dimensional convolutions into cascaded one-dimensional dilated convolutions, which expands the receptive field while reducing computational complexity. Next, to substantially improve detection accuracy, a reparameterized generalized feature pyramid network is constructed, incorporating CSPStage structures and dynamic channel regulation strategies to optimize multi-scale feature fusion efficiency during inference. Results: Evaluations on the KITTI dataset show that SDO-YOLO achieves a 2.8% increase in mAP@0.5 compared to the baseline, alongside reductions of 7.9% in parameters and 6.3% in computation. Generalization tests on BDD100K and UA-DETRAC datasets yield mAP@0.5 improvements of 1.9% and 3.7%, respectively, over the baseline. Conclusions: SDO-YOLO achieves improvements in both accuracy and efficiency, demonstrating strong robustness across diverse scenarios and adaptability across datasets.