PC-CS-YOLO: High-Precision Obstacle Detection for Visually Impaired Safety

Abstract

The issue of obstacle avoidance and safety for visually impaired individuals has been a major topic of research. However, complex street environments still pose significant challenges for blind obstacle detection systems. Existing solutions often fail to provide real-time, accurate obstacle avoidance decisions. In this study, we propose a blind obstacle detection system based on the PC-CS-YOLO model. The system improves the backbone network by adopting the partial convolutional feed-forward network (PCFN) to reduce computational redundancy. Additionally, to enhance the network’s robustness in multi-scale feature fusion, we introduce the Cross-Scale Attention Fusion (CSAF) mechanism, which integrates features from different sensory domains to achieve superior performance. Compared to state-of-the-art networks, our system shows improvements of 2.0%, 3.9%, and 1.5% in precision, recall, and mAP50, respectively. When evaluated on a GPU, the inference speed is 20.6 ms, which is 15.3 ms faster than YOLO11, meeting the real-time requirements for blind obstacle avoidance systems.

Keywords

• YOLO11
• deep learning
• object detection
• visually impaired
• PC-CS-YOLO