A detection method for the ridge beast based on improved YOLOv3 algorithm

The ridge beast is a beast placed on the ridge of the roof of ancient Chinese buildings, not only has a decorative function, and has a strict hierarchical meaning, the number and form of the ridge beast placed on different levels of buildings are strictly limited. The detection technology of ridge beast decorative parts has important application value in the fields of fine 3D reconstruction of ancient buildings, historical dating and cultural and tourism services. Aiming at the problem of poor detection performance of traditional detection algorithms due to high texture similarity and poor discrimination of ridge beast, this paper proposed an improved YOLOv3 based detection algorithm for ridge beast decorative pieces. In terms of basic network improvement, local features are aggregated to the deep separable convolution internal embedding summation layer, and point convolution is used to connect the channel information of original features and aggregated features, so as to expand the receptive field and learn more diverse features. The residual structure of the feature extraction network was constructed by using the convolution, and the extraction effect of the model on the fine-grained features of the ridge beast was optimized, so that the detection accuracy was improved. In the prediction head improvement of the model, the original linear structure was reconstructed, and the extrusion and excitation modules were introduced to model the channel relationship of multi-scale feature map, which suppressed the response of interference signals and made the feature more directivity. The parallel 1 × 1 and 3 × 3 convolution are used to construct a multi-size convolution structure, which enhances the semantic information extraction ability of the model and further improves the detection effect. Experiments were conducted on the constructed ridge-beast dataset, and the results showed that the mAP of the improved algorithm can reach 86.48%, which is 3.05% higher than YOLO-v3, and the model parameters are reduced by 70%, which has a better detection performance and can provide a reference for the automated detection of ancient building components.