Enhancement of YOLOv8 for object detection in adverse weather conditions using generative adversarial network

Abstract

Detecting objects in bad weather like rain, fog, snow, or low light is still difficult because visibility drops, noise increases, and contrast gets worse, all of which hurt detection accuracy. Most current methods either improve detector designs or use image preprocessing on their own. They usually focus on just one type of weather and do not use a common way to evaluate results. This paper introduces a YOLOv8 framework improved with a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image enhancement before detection. Instead of just making images look better, the GAN is trained to help the object detector work better in tough conditions, so it can extract features more effectively when images are degraded. The model was tested on datasets with different weather conditions using standard metrics like Precision, Recall, F1-score, and mean average precision (mAP). Results show that this method consistently improves performance, with up to a 6.5% increase in mAP@0.5 over YOLOv8-STE and 9.2% over IA-YOLO, especially in foggy and low-light situations. These results show that adding GAN-based preprocessing to YOLOv8 makes detection more reliable and still keeps the process fast. This framework offers a practical and scalable solution for real-world uses like self-driving cars, smart transportation, and surveillance.