EdgeCaseDNet: An enhanced detection architecture for edge case perception in autonomous driving

Autonomous driving perception systems still encounter significant challenges in edge scenarios involving multi-scale target changes and adverse weather, which seriously compromise detection reliability. To address this issue, we introduce a novel edge case dataset that extends existing benchmarks by capturing extreme road conditions (fog, rain, snow, nighttime et al.) with precise annotations, and develop EdgeCaseDNet as an optimized object-detection framework. EdgeCaseDNet’s architecture extends YOLOv8 through four synergistic innovations: (1) a Haar_HGNetv2 backbone that enables hierarchical feature extraction with enhanced long-range dependencies, (2) an asymptotic feature pyramid network for context-aware multi-scale fusion, (3) a hybrid partial depth-wise separable convolution module, and (4) Wise-IoU loss optimization for accelerated convergence. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrated the superiority of EdgeCaseDNet over YOLOv8, achieving improvements of +10.6% in mAP@50, and +8.4% in mAP@[.5:.95]. All the relevant codes are available at https://github.com/yutianku/EdgeCaseDNet.