Journal of Soft Computing Exploration
Vol. 7 No. 2 (2026): June 2026

Enhancing YOLO performance with attention module for plastic and non-plastic waste detection on water surfaces

Priadana, Adri (Unknown)
Murdiyanto, Aris Wahyu (Unknown)
Akrianto, Muhammad Ichwandar (Unknown)
Cahyono, Heru (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
05 May 2026

Abstract

The rapid accumulation of plastic waste in aquatic environments poses serious threats to ecosystems, water management systems, and human health. This growing concern creates an urgent need for efficient and accurate detection methods. To address this challenge, this work proposes an approach to enhance YOLO performance by integrating attention modules for plastic and non-plastic waste detection on water surfaces. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted on the Plastic on Water dataset, considering detection accuracy, computational complexity, and inference speed. The results identify YOLO11n as the most effective baseline, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 96.3% with 2,590,230 parameters, 6.4 GFLOPs, and an inference speed of 18.58 FPS. To further improve performance, several attention modules are integrated into the YOLO11n architecture. Among them, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) yields the best performance, achieving an mAP of 96.7% with 2,598,520 parameters and 6.5 GFLOPs, while maintaining real-time performance at 18.26 FPS. The results demonstrate improved detection capability, particularly for small and less prominent objects, with negligible additional computational cost. These findings highlight the effectiveness of attention mechanisms, especially CBAM, in enhancing lightweight object detection models for real-time aquatic waste monitoring.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

journal

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Control & Systems Engineering Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Description

The journal focuses on publishing high-quality, original research and review articles in the field of Soft Computing, Informatics and Computer Science, emphasizing the development, application, and rigorous evaluation of Advanced Computational Methods, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning ...