DSCMamba-TAD-YOLOv8: A Lightweight YOLOv8-Based Model for Power Line Inspection

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Power line component and insulator defect detection is an important task in intelligent transmission line inspection. However, UAV-based inspection images often contain small, densely distributed targets under complex backgrounds, making it difficult for existing detectors to balance accuracy and model compactness. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lightweight YOLOv8-based detector named DSCMamba-TAD-YOLOv8. First, depthwise separable convolutions are introduced into the Neck to reduce parameters and computational cost. Second, DSCMambaNet replaces the original C2f module to enhance multi-scale feature representation by combining lightweight local feature extraction and cross-region contextual modeling. An embedded CBAM component is further integrated inside DSCMambaNet to strengthen informative channel responses and spatial regions. Finally, a Task-Aware Dynamic Detection Head, named TADetect, improves head adaptability through scale-aware and task-aware feature modulation. Experiments on the InsPLAD-det dataset show that DSCMamba-TAD-YOLOv8 achieves 91.86% Precision, 88.02% Recall, 91.83% mAP@0.5, and 74.82% mAP@0.5:0.95. Compared with YOLOv8n, the proposed model improves Precision, mAP@0.5, and mAP@0.5:0.95 by 4.09, 2.43, and 4.46 percentage points, respectively, while maintaining a comparable Recall level with a slight increase from 87.04% to 88.02%. Meanwhile, Params decrease from 3.209 M to 2.702 M and GFLOPs from 8.2 to 7.5. On the revised TPL-SOD held-out test subset, the proposed model improves Precision from 86.20% to 88.16%, mAP@0.5 from 87.09% to 88.81%, and mAP@0.5:0.95 from 68.44% to 70.13%, while Recall remains stable and slightly increases from 91.75% to 92.33%. These results demonstrate that DSCMamba-TAD-YOLOv8 improves detection accuracy and localization quality while maintaining a compact structure and stable recall performance.