YOLOv11m–CA: Lightweight Coordinate Attention for Tiny Person and Bicycle Detection in a VOC-Based Setting

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Detecting small person and bicycle instances with lightweight models is relevant to resource-aware visual sensing, but evidence from a category-filtered general-purpose dataset cannot establish performance in dense surveillance, traffic monitoring, or aerial environments. This study therefore examines a narrower question: whether replacement-style Coordinate Attention (CA) integration can improve coordinate-sensitive representation in YOLOv11m under a controlled VOC-based person and bicycle setting without increasing model complexity. In the official Ultralytics YOLO11m architecture, the Spatial Pyramid Pooling–Fast (SPPF) layer is followed by a C2PSA block. The proposed configuration replaces this post-SPPF C2PSA block with CA, while retaining the remaining backbone, neck, and detection head. CA encodes directional positional information along the horizontal and vertical axes. Experiments are conducted on a filtered subset of PASCAL Visual Object Classes (VOC) 2012 that retains only the person and bicycle categories; this subset is not a dedicated small-object or surveillance benchmark. Within this setting, the proposed model improves mean average precision at an intersection-over-union threshold of 0.50 (mAP@50) from 79.2% to 81.5%. It also improves mean average precision averaged over thresholds from 0.50 to 0.95 (mAP@50–95) from 53.9% to 54.8% and small-instance average precision (APs) from 68.1% to 72.4%. The parameter count decreases from 20.03M to 19.07M, and the model achieves 90 frames per second (FPS) on the tested NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU (NVIDIA Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA). These results provide incremental evidence for a complexity-aware CA replacement strategy within the evaluated VOC distribution; they do not demonstrate cross-domain generalization or deployment performance in real surveillance or aerial scenarios. No embedded platform was evaluated, and the reported RTX 4060 throughput should not be interpreted as evidence of edge-device latency, energy efficiency, or deployment readiness.