Improved Chinese Giant Salamander Parental Care Behavior Detection Based on YOLOv8

Optimizing the breeding techniques and increasing the hatching rate of Andrias davidianus offspring necessitates a thorough understanding of its parental care behaviors. However, A. davidianus’ nocturnal and cave-dwelling tendencies pose significant challenges for direct observation. To address this problem, this study constructed a dataset for the parental care behavior of A. davidianus, applied the target detection method to this behavior for the first time, and proposed a detection model for A. davidianus’ parental care behavior based on the YOLOv8s algorithm. Firstly, a multi-scale feature fusion convolution (MSConv) is proposed and combined with a C2f module, which significantly enhances the feature extraction capability of the model. Secondly, the large separable kernel attention is introduced into the spatial pyramid pooling fast (SPPF) layer to effectively reduce the interference factors in the complex environment. Thirdly, to address the problem of low quality of captured images, Wise-IoU (WIoU) is used to replace CIoU in the original YOLOv8 to optimize the loss function and improve the model’s robustness. The experimental results show that the model achieves 85.7% in the mAP50-95, surpassing the YOLOv8s model by 2.1%. Compared with other mainstream models, the overall performance of our model is much better and can effectively detect the parental care behavior of A. davidianus. Our research method not only offers a reference for the behavior recognition of A. davidianus and other amphibians but also provides a new strategy for the smart breeding of A. davidianus.