SDOD: An efficient object detection method for self-driving cars based on hierarchical cross-scale features

With the increasing prominence of autonomous vehicles in recent years, rapid and accurate environmental perception has become crucial for the operational safety and decision-making capabilities. To address the challenge of achieving an optimal balance between accuracy and real-time performance under in-vehicle computational constraints, this paper presented an efficient object detection algorithm for self-driving cars, which extracted the hierarchical cross-scale features based on a shifted-window attention mechanism. By integrating this improved feature representation with the more efficient feature fusion neck and detection head based on depth-wise separable convolution, the proposed approach significantly reduced model complexity and improves detection speed while maintaining near-identical detection accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that this method simultaneously enhances processing speed and reduced model complexity while maintaining high detection precision, with floating-point operations reduced from 21.5 G to 6.0 G, a decrease of 15.5 G and an increase of 139 frames per second compared to YOLOv11s. This combination of efficiency and accuracy made the proposed algorithm particularly adaptable for resource-constraint self-driving systems.