Abstract
Maintaining a safe working environment for construction workers is critical to the improvement of urban areas. Several issues plague the present safety helmet detection technologies utilized on construction sites. Some of these issues include low accuracy, expensive deployment of edge devices, and complex backgrounds. To overcome these obstacles, this paper introduces a detection method that is both efficient and based on an improved version of YOLOv8n. Three components make up the superior algorithm: the C2f-SCConv architecture, the Partial Convolutional Detector (PCD), and Coordinate Attention (CA). Detection, redundancy reduction, and feature localization accuracy are all improved with coordinate attention. To further enhance feature quality, decrease computing cost, and make corrections more effective, a Partial Convolution detector is subsequently constructed. Feature refinement and feature representation are made more effective by using C2f-SCConv instead of the bottleneck C2f module. In comparison to its predecessor, the upgraded YOLOv8n is superior in every respect. It reduced model size by 2.21 MB, increased frame rate by 12.6 percent, decreased FLOPs by 49.9 percent, and had an average accuracy of 94.4 percent. This method is more efficient, quicker, and cheaper to set up on-site than conventional helmet-detection algorithms.