A global lightweight deep learning model for express package detection

Abstract

Unmanned sorting technology can significantly improve the transportation efficiency of the logistics industry, and package detection technology is an important component of unmanned sorting. This paper proposes a lightweight deep learning network called EPYOLO, in which a lightweight self-attention feature extraction backbone network named EPnet is also designed. It also reduces the Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) and parameter count during the feature extraction process through an improved Contextual Transformer-slim (CoTs) self-attention module and GSNConv module. To balance network performance and obtain semantic information for express packages of different sizes and shapes, a multi-scale pyramid structure is adopted using the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and the Path Aggregation Network (PAN). Finally, comparative experiments were conducted with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model by using a self-built dataset of express packages by using a self-built dataset of express packages, results demonstrate that the mean Average Precision (mAP) of the EPYOLO network reaches 98.8%, with parameter quantity only 11.63% of YOLOv8 s and FLOPs only 9.16% of YOLOv8 s. Moreover, compared to the YOLOv8 s network, the EPYOLO network shows superior detection performance for small targets and overlapping express packages.