IAES International Journal of Robotics and Automation (IJRA)
Vol 15, No 3: September 2026

Spatial-channel reconstruction for efficient multiscale attention in robotic object detection

Mohammed Maiza (University of Oran 1 Ahmed Ben Bella)
Chahira Cherif (University of Oran 1 Ahmed Ben Bella)
Samira Chouraqui (University of Sciences and Technology of Oran)
Abdelmalik Taleb-Ahmed (University of Lille)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Sep 2026

Abstract

Real-time object detection is a core capability for autonomous robots, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and self-driving systems operating in resource-constrained environments. This paper presents spatial-channel enhanced multiscale attention (SCEMA), a novel lightweight attention module designed to enhance robotic perception while minimizing computational overhead for embedded deployment. SCEMA employs a parallel dual-branch architecture that synergistically combines spatial-channel reconstruction with multiscale attention mechanisms. When integrated into the YOLOv8n framework (3.01M baseline parameters), the proposed YOLO-SCEMA model achieves significant performance gains across multiple challenging benchmarks relevant to robotics automation. Experiments on an NVIDIA RTX 4080 GPU demonstrate that on the ExDark dataset, YOLO-SCEMA improves mAP@50 by 7.37% over the baseline (69.07% to 76.44%) while reducing parameters by 36.88% (3.01M to 1.90M) and computational cost by 8.64% (8.1 to 7.4 GFLOPs). Consistent improvements are also observed on VisDrone2019 (+3.24% mAP@50) and FYP (+1.50% mAP@50) datasets. Comparative analysis demonstrates that YOLOSCEMA achieves superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, making it particularly suitable for deployment in low-light conditions, dense scenes, and complex structural environments for autonomous navigation, robotic surveillance, and industrial automation applications.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

IJRA

Publisher

Subject

Automotive Engineering Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Description

Robots are becoming part of people's everyday social lives and will increasingly become so. In future years, robots may become caretaker assistants for the elderly, or academic tutors for our children, or medical assistants, day care assistants, or psychological counselors. Robots may become our ...