RTAD: A Real-Time Animal Object Detection Model Based on a Large Selective Kernel and Channel Pruning

Animal resources are significant to human survival and development and the ecosystem balance. Automated multi-animal object detection is critical in animal research and conservation and ecosystem monitoring. The objective is to design a model that mitigates the challenges posed by the large number of parameters and computations in existing animal object detection methods. We developed a backbone network with enhanced representative capabilities to pursue this goal. This network combines the foundational structure of the Transformer model with the Large Selective Kernel (LSK) module, known for its wide receptive field. To further reduce the number of parameters and computations, we incorporated a channel pruning technique based on Fisher information to eliminate channels of lower importance. With the help of the advantages of the above designs, a real-time animal object detection model based on a Large Selective Kernel and channel pruning (RTAD) was built. The model was evaluated using a public animal dataset, AP-10K, which included 50 annotated categories. The results demonstrated that our model has almost half the parameters of YOLOv8-s yet surpasses it by 6.2 AP. Our model provides a new solution for real-time animal object detection.